Overview
What is HCL Connections?
Connections from HCL Technologies (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in 2018) is a collaboration tool and employee digital workspace with key features like social analytics, blogs, document management, and a social network.
A multifunctional tool
Connections is a proven tool for managing complicated projects and keeping your data secure
IBM Connections in the Cloud - One Stop for Communication and Collaboration
A complete package but expensive and complicated to maintain
IBM Connections - Not Connecting Ideas!
IBM Connections is useful
Not flashy, but it gets the job done
Connect with IBM Connections!
The business problems that it …
Great all-around tool for the large but also small environments
IBM Connections on-premises: Excellent, but SMBs may want to look at the cloud version instead.
Connecting with your colleagues made easy!
IBM Connections Connects people in a different way to work
IBM Connections review
Non-techy review of IBM Connections
IBM Connections is everything you need to unite professionals around the globe.
Pricing
What is HCL Connections?
Connections from HCL Technologies (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in 2018) is a collaboration tool and employee digital workspace with key features like social analytics, blogs, document management, and a social network.
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- No setup fee
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- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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What is HCL Connections?
HCL Connections Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
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(52)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
IBM Connections is a versatile platform used organization-wide to connect users, find and organize information, and collaborate on projects. Users across departments benefit from the collaboration tools offered by IBM Connections for internal projects and team collaboration. Additionally, frontline production workers to board members rely on this software for project management, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and idea sharing.
IBM Connections addresses various business problems such as document editing, sharing, version control, as well as enabling increased transparency. It serves as a centralized repository for constantly changing information with multiple levels of permissions, tagging, and spaces. This makes it an ideal replacement for wikis, providing structure in organizing and updating information effectively.
Organizations in the insurance industry utilize IBM Connections to write wiki places and blogs in different languages. Mizuno utilizes IBM Connections organization-wide to keep everyone informed and connected, share data, and stay updated on company-wide events. The software is also being evaluated for cloud options to provide document control, integration of social tools, and compatibility with various devices.
Users find value in IBM Connections' communication features to connect with staff and disseminate information within communities created for individual departments. The software's usage statistics and reporting capabilities are crucial for users to track the effectiveness of their content. Additionally, the HR department benefits from the MS Office plugin for sharing and editing documents.
Overall, IBM Connections has proven to be an invaluable tool in improving communication among teams, facilitating collaboration between departments spread across large geographical areas, and providing a centralized platform for everyday operations.
Users commonly recommend IBM Connections for the following reasons:
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IBM Connections is praised for its ability to enhance collaboration and social networking within a business. Users find it helpful for improving teamwork and communication among employees.
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Many users recommend IBM Connections for its features such as email, calendars, meeting rooms, and document sharing. It is considered suitable for companies with multiple departments that require transparency in operations.
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Users suggest having IT staff who can handle the layout and functionality of IBM Connections to maximize its potential. They also recommend it for environments that support self-service and where end users want a well-structured content storage interaction.
Overall, IBM Connections is deemed valuable in strengthening internal social networks, improving collaboration, and providing efficient communication within organizations. It is particularly recommended for larger companies looking to save time with social and collaboration-based solutions, but can also benefit businesses of all sizes that aim to enhance their productivity and foster connectivity among employees.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-9 of 9)Not flashy, but it gets the job done
- The plugin for MS Office/Explorer has made saving and sharing working documents extremely convenient for me and my close colleagues
- The newsfeed feature conveniently aggregates updates from the communities/people you follow. It's nice not to have to jump from community to community to see what's going on in the organization
- The various apps can be used for several purposes. A little creativity goes a long way when establishing what type of information the apps can be useful for communicating
- Navigating Connections is tedious and time-consuming. More times than not I find it easier to simply search for what I'm looking for rather than trying to find what I need through other means
- While file uploading and sharing files is useful enough, the browser lacks the seamless nature of Google Docs and the plugin can't hold a candle to Sharepoint. It works, but I find it clunky
- We sorely miss our one-stop homepage (The Hub) that has been replaced by IBM Connections. There is no "jump-off" page to provide ease of navigation. It would really nice to be able to provide bookmarks and/or some form of directory in the side tabs of the newsfeed.
Ex) The status feature is essentially useless without following the person posting the status. We do not follow individual staff members because it leads to a cluttered newsfeed with information irrelevant to other departments. We still use our phone chat client to communicate statuses.
IBM Connections on-premises: Excellent, but SMBs may want to look at the cloud version instead.
- The web UI is very easy for most users to get around. The mobile app UI is even better, especially for Blogs and Files. It’s clear IBM has done a lot of work around the usability of Connections. Most users immediately felt at home regardless of which social network(s) they’ve used. Technically savvy users quickly discovered how to customize a Community for their own purposes. After the initial introduction, most users could use the Connections web UI and mobile app easily without IT intervention.
- Ideation Blogs are a great way to brainstorm and share ideas, then vote on those ideas. The concept is great, and hopefully as time goes on IBM refines it with additional administrative control.
- Early test groups loved the mobile app immediately with its super easy file sync capabilities and associated document editing app (even though we did not have IBM Docs).
- Profiles were a big hit right away, making it easy to find, tag (recommend), and follow other people that might not otherwise be connected with in the organization.
- The ability to Tag, #hashtag and Follow virtually anything in Connections provides users easy ways to connect with people and content.
- External collaboration, even though we never specifically tested this, appears to be very clear in Connections, providing customers etc. a secure way to share information with internal teams.
- Search functionality is very good.
- The lack of a note-taking tool became a bigger and bigger issue as time went on. Our pilot users felt Connections was a natural place to take and share meeting notes – including photos, drawings, recorded audio, etc. – and were always frustrated that there was no easy, organized way to do that. We tried using a Blog, Wiki, etc. but nothing really resonated as a good solution for this.
- The Wiki tool is weak, providing rigid structure but with few options. A Community can only have a single Wiki, for instance. Wikis are weak in the mobile app as well; they’re not even easy to navigate. Users ended up ignoring Wikis completely despite our efforts to get them to convert documents like guidelines, policies, procedures, handbooks, etc. into Wiki form.
- The Windows Explorer plug-in was useful but required a lot of manual intervention to setup. For instance, once a user joins a Community in Connections, the Community also has to be manually added to the Explorer plug-in so the user can find, open and edit files with it. We felt this process should be much more automated.
- Tagging is only relevant in the web UI and, to a lesser extent, in the mobile app. However, in the Windows Explorer plug-in, Tags are not usable at all making it difficult to find things that were easy to find in the web UI.
- IBM Docs was not included in the on-premises deployment; it was an additional license so we did not test it. Documents, mainly Microsoft Office files, are still the single most common way our user community creates, shares, edits and presents information. That proved to be a major gap for our users, and slowed user adoption considerably. We considered testing it, but IBM Docs would only work for about half of our users so we found ourselves wondering if we really wanted to support two document editing platforms. IBM Docs also offers no way to work offline as far as we could tell. This also meant we would need to keep licensing Microsoft Office which is not cheap.
- Consulting costs are high because the back-end environment is complex. Installing, administrating and even patching Connections is a fairly complex process. We needed to hire consultants to install our test environment and any major upgrades would’ve required additional consulting fees. Any 3rd party add-ons we looked at were highly technical in nature meaning…you guessed it, more consulting costs.
- Administrating IBM Connections requires editing XML files in a specific, secure way that is typically done in a console. I love consoles as much as the next admin, but when you only use a console once every 2 months it means looking up all the documentation and re-educating yourself. A single change could take me 2 hours to implement. 3rd party admin dashboards do exist, at an additional cost, but IBM really should provide a much easier way to manage the environment.
- The lack of in-person or online training courses, materials, videos, etc. really discouraged a lot of users. The only decent training we could find (marketing videos aside) was a single video series on Lynda.com which, of course, was an additional cost. In the end that video didn’t really help our users much beyond introductory concepts.
- IBM includes reporting, but it’s a massive Cognos system requiring some serious hardware and Cognos expertise. We had neither, and would have ultimately opted for a 3rd party add-on for reporting and statistics.
- An often overlooked concern is eDiscovery. Our contracted eDiscovery service extensively works with various ECMs, but had no idea how they would handle Connections data. The cloud version of Connections offers an add-on for eDiscovery, but as far as we could tell IBM offered nothing for on-premises deployments.
If you work in a large company with lots of IT resources experienced with IBM tech such as WebSphere, DB2, etc., then I’d change the recommendation to an 8 for IBM Connections on-premises. Users really loved working in IBM Connections despite various gaps they found, and it seems that IBM is very responsive to customer feedback. Many new features in the last few releases were first suggested by customers.
Similarly, if you work in an SMB and are looking at IBM Connections online (or SmartCloud or whatever IBM calls it these days), then I’d probably also say 8 assuming the cloud version is at least as good as the on-premises version. My guess is that the cloud version is probably better, given IBM’s cloud-first strategy, and don’t forget that the cloud version includes IBM Docs.
If, however, you are in an SMB with a budget-constrained IT staff who are mostly familiar with Microsoft and who find it difficult to work with anything non-Microsoft, then IBM Connections on-premises is probably not going to work well in your organization. I’d score it a 4 in that case. Even if it works well for end-users today, as time goes on it seems users discover more gaps with the software. IBM is not quick to put out new versions of their on-premises software, either. The primary reasons I think on-premises is a tough sell in this scenario are the high cost of consulting (which has a side effect of further delaying the introduction of new features), the lack of an office document editor built-in, and the lack of training for both IT and end-users alike.
Connecting with your colleagues made easy!
- IBM Connections provides anytime, anywhere access. Whether from a browser, mobile device, desktop plugins, or IBM Notes, you can access IBM Connections in the way that is convenient for you.
- The search functionality is extremely powerful! You can search across everything in the system or just specific sections.
- If you are unsure of WHO to ask about something in your organization, the Directory Tags and Search can put you in touch with just the right person.
- As one who not only uses but also implements the software, IBM could still do further streamlining of the product's installation routines. I have been working with the product since Version 1, and it has gotten somewhat better in general. But new add-on packages pose more problems with installations and upgrades.
- It would be nice to be able to more easily customize the interface. I would like it if IBM would provide less complicated CSS.
- There is also a common request from systems administrators to have a consistent web interface for managing the various parts of the environment.
IBM Connections review
- The Mobile consummation of IBM Connections is very good and is rapidly improving over time. Every month a new version of the Mobile app for IBM Connections is being delivered which fixes bugs but also adds new functionality over time.
- Stability is very high of the product as it runs on IBM WebSphere (which has proved itself already in the MidMarket segment completely) and is very important for us as a customer because this keeps the day to day management costs for the environment very low.
- The open design of the product. It's fairly easy to extend the product but also the end user working and feeling is open. What I mean by that is that the product supports self serviceability so no costs at the IT department regarding of creating FileShares and so on.
- Out of the box IBM Connections delivers a complete solution which can be used as a base to extend on. Connections to already existing LDAP/SAP/Domiono or other HR systems can easily be build via the delivered license of IBM Security Directory Integrator product with IBM Connections which is almost limitless in connecting different resources together.
- The UI of the activities component really needs a redesign. Currently this component was there already from the beginning of IBM Connections and never got a UI overhaul. Currently the functionality is working exceptionally good but the UI is too much based on Text instead of a graphical UI.
- Better integration with PIM (Personal Information Manager like (domino and/or exchange)) environments.
- Currently for the admin side of IBM Connections a lot is done on the command line. It would be a improvement if we get a special designed ADMIN UI. Where 95% of the management of the product can be handled.
Non-techy review of IBM Connections
- Easy to set up communities
- Easy to customize communities and add/delete different widgets
- Easy to navigate
- We have had some difficulty in bridging IBM Connections with several other applications (security mainly)
- I would like to be able to customize and name the widgets to match up with our member-facing tool (ie. IBM Connections calls it a "blog," whereas our member-facing application calls this area "news."
Diversity of Connections
- Notifications - easily notifying users of changes in content whether it be blogs, forums or files.
- Discussions - easily and quickly set up discussion topics so communities can exchange ideas on a variety of topics.
- Quick set up - being able to rapidly set up a community in order to get a group collaborating.
- Increased security schemes.
- Community centric configurations
- Displays of textual type content (web pages)
IBM Connections Review
- File sharing is easy to upload.
- Can glance at your home screen for quick looks at everyone's status updates to see where people are and what's going on.
- Can be emailed notifications of new posts to click and immediately go there.
- Learning the site can be overwhelming with all the options it provides. I still don't feel like I know 100% of everything offered and how to get to it.
- A lot of information overload and can be hard trying to navigate where you want to go at first.
- Files app - Excellent for a replacement of shared drives. Using a cloud based system is the way of the future.
- Communities - We use this in our department for an easy to access centralized hub of information. For the company, we have used this to start a Couch to 5K which has increased efficiency and morale.
- Search function - Fast way to find what you're looking for! A task that could sometimes take hours tracking down through traditional methods, finding what you're looking for has never been easier!
- Files - It would be nice to have an option of folders within folders for easier organization.
- Iphone App - Would love to see a chat function on the app (love the chat function through the website with Sametime)
- Blogging is easy and useful. For any company above a certain size, it is impractical to share things via email, particularly as an email chain with comments quickly gets out of control. Using a public social platform has obvious problems. Connections blogs makes it all easy.
- Using and creating Wikis, and even structuring related Wikis, is easy and intuitive. Before Wikis, institutuional knowledge, product documentation, etc. was spread all over. Wikis solved that.
- Searching is the key to it all. Connections search results were quick and more easily useful than competing platforms.
- Though we don't use the latest version of Connections, my only real complaint has been the lack of "hot" links in Blog comments.
- The management interface could be easier to use, or a bit better documented, particularly when dealing with error logs.