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.
Connections is a corporate collaboration software that enables teams to operate more efficiently. It improves communication among project teams. It provides all employees with...
We use Connections as a repository and means of communication for internal projects. It is being used by all departments and is a good tool for team collaboration.
IBM Connections is being used across the entire organization and is available to us on our internet browser via the cloud. IBM Connections is our tool to connect to each other...
IBM Connections is used by the entire organization. We have many departments and user groups that are divided into Connections "communities". It helps connects users across th...
IBM Connections is being used largely as a wiki replacement system because of its tight integration with other IBM products. For instance, we used (and have since replaced) IB...
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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Microsoft's SharePoint is an Intranet solution that enables users to share and manage content, knowledge, and applications to empower teamwork, quickly find information, and collaborate across the organization.
Enterprise AI Search, Intranet, and Wiki in one platform. Guru lives in tools organizations already use, so no need to context switch. Users can find info across any app, have an expert help if the info can't be found, and let Guru proactively identify knowledge gaps, duplicate knowledge, and…
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.
HCL Connections Technical Details
Operating Systems
Unspecified
Mobile Application
No
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 9.
The most common users of HCL Connections are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
We currently use IBM Connections as a backend platform. We have built a custom platform (member-facing) on top of IBM Connections. Our member-facing platform currently serving over 100,000 members. Our main use of IBM Connections is for the collaboration tools that it offers.
Easy to customize communities and add/delete different widgets
Easy to navigate
Cons
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."
It is currently being used by a number of departments throughout the company. It is addressing different problems within each department but primarily it is being used to disseminate information, used for notifications of important deadlines and for collaboration between a large geographical area.
In assessing whether or not to use Connections, the primary issues are whether or not they need true web type pages and the level of security needed. The options are usually Connections or a portal site. If they don't have a need for multiple levels of access to the content or have to display web type pages then I direct them towards Connections where they can be up and running in literally 10 minutes.
At Mizuno, IBM Connections is being used across the whole organization as a tool to keep everyone informed and connected. People from across different departments can join different communities with groups of people with the same interests and create and keep up with upcoming events. It's a convenient way to share data and keep up with what's going on across the entire company.
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.
Cons
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.
Connections is very helpful between those of us at corporate, and those of us out on the field since we have employees all across the US. It's harder to know what's going on with those kinds of distances between the two, so having a tool that keeps track of work events is great. It is also helpful between those of us at corporate who need to share the same documents. Now they are all in one place.
We are currently using IBM Connections for communication across all departments. It has been great being able to collaborate across the board. In our department, we have been able to quickly and efficiently share important information, saving valuable time. The files on IBM Connections work great as a cloud and will soon replace our shared drives. As a company of 300+, the communities have brought unique individuals together that wouldn't have found each other without it.
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!
Cons
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)
IBM Connections is an excellent tool when a department or company needs to share a lot of information between other departments or individuals. Using IBM Connections for company wide updates are much more convenient than email blasting. The only downside to IBM Connections I could see is if someone doesn't have frequent access to a computer (ex. manufacturer, warehouse, etc.).
We piloted IBM Connections 5.0 (on-premises) for about 8 months but ended up deciding to evaluate cloud options instead. Our user base is about 650 users and we were looking to move up from Lotus Quickr. We knew we needed something that would work natively on iOS as well as on Windows PCs and in browsers, provide us with additional document control (ECM-type features), and of course integration of social tools to provide easier access to people and information. Usage statistics and reporting were also a concern; users wanted to know when their content was useful (or not).
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.
Cons
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.
