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HCL Connections

HCL Connections
Formerly from IBM

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.

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Recent Reviews

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IBM Connections is a versatile platform used organization-wide to connect users, find and organize information, and collaborate on …
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IBM Connections review

9 out of 10
February 25, 2015
IBM Connections is being used throughout the whole organization (34,000+ end users) as a social addition to the statically delivered …
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Pricing

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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 Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

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.

HCL Connections Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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 Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(54)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

(1-2 of 2)
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February 25, 2015

IBM Connections review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
IBM Connections is being used throughout the whole organization (34,000+ end users) as a social addition to the statically delivered intranet. The main business problem and why this organizations has decided to choose for IBM Connections is in fact that it pushed out to the end users to work more closely together on projects and in day to day work situations. IBM Connections fulfills in that completely. With the mobility part of IBM Connections the circle was completely round as this was one of the biggest issue's we had with the current intranet which was too much statically build and not developed for mobile clients (not build with a responsive web design). We have just introduced the CCM part of IBM Connections which will replace overtime to all current file-shares which are being delivered via OLD fashioned way of serving files via a FileServer model. All this together is for us a major improvement on the next step of our journey in the intranet world.
  • 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.
IBM Connections is well suited in environments where self serviceability is supported and end user wants the next iteration of storing content/knowledge inside mails and or documents.
  • On the customer service part - one of the positive sides of IBM Connections is the openness. Thanks to that openness people started to help each other when they posted problems regarding company issues instead and they followed the officially designed business processes. In the end this made our company much more cost effective.
  • Because of the mobility functionality of IBM Connections we really saw a big jump in the employee efficiency corner. They could access their documents faster and wherever they where around the globe.
Because of the open design of the product but also because of the main support for http://activitystrea.ms/ which was a huge jump in end user news retrieval of the environment. The overall cost of the product was so much lower than comparing products as out of the box IBM Connections already delivered lots where other products we reviewed needed add-on tools with their license fees as well.
35000
Mainly as a knowldege management hub within the company but also it is currently serving us as the next step for file sharing. Within a very soon to see time we will completely switch off file shares for our end user and we expect that all content currently on file shares will be offered and driven by IBM Connections.
4
The skills of these people need to be very broad, as we talk about so many environments where IBM Connections is used. IBM WebSphere/SDI/DB2/HTTPServer/LoadBalancers/OperatingSystems and so on. So it needs to be well skilled people who need to maintain these kind of environments.
  • Better collaboration of business users of different departments
  • 24/7 availability of content and knowledge
  • Mobility support from IBM
  • Self serviceability of end users (business users).
  • Much more helpful to each other if they see from each other they struggle with the same day to day problems.
  • Content/ Documents are reused more instead of reinvented now that people can find their content.
  • Extend the reach of the platform to other platforms to get that UI/content inside connections as well.
  • Get a more steering management layer within the organization than a leading management (which is currently the situation within the organization)
  • Connect the current business process more and more to this collaboration platform.
No
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
  • Analyst Reports
The openness of the product which gave us the possibility to adapt to our current organization rules and compliances. But also the vendor reputation was a big decision maker. In this fast evolving IT market you need from a business standpoint, stability and product support for the future.
To be honest regarding the selection process, I think we would do it exactly the same again. This has proved us to be quite successful still. The only thing we would change a bit is finding the right people inside the business acting as the ambassadors for the environment. I would align that much more in a day to day business situation instead of classes and we did it right now.
  • Implemented in-house
  • Professional services company
Ilionx which is a IT Services company and also an IBM Business Partner.
Yes
We first have built a PoC environment where the stakeholders of the project could investigate how the product could assist in their day to day operations. Then we have built a development environment and finally we have built a production environment. As this platform didn't really phase out another product, we have decided to let the new collaboration platform spread it itself within the company and within 6 months we have reached throughout all employees (we could see that form the login statistics of the end users).
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled
When you try to deliver a new environment everybody has an opninon on how things should look and work. So try to keep the team who implements the environment as small as possible. Make rapid decission about how things should look and work and change behavior over time when the environment is in production and afterall you see end users complaining about certain functionalities. Don't try to build everything at once but do it over time !
  • Deciding how the environment had to be called within the organization.
  • Lack of knowledge within the company about the product (in the end this was covered by hiring external people) to keep the project going.
  • Network infrastructre wasn't prepared on how we wanted to adapt the network infrastructure to our needs.
Try to understand you will never find a product which suites all your end user for 100%. IBM Connections is the best of all breeds but if you go look on each functionality on its own there are better example out there. But as IBM COnnections delivers it all in just one platform makes it the best example about integration of different functionality into one platform.
  • In-person training
Yes
Because it allows us to reach further in the support organization from IBM than otherwise would have been the case. This gives us certain advantages which makes it easier (and cheaper) than not doing so.
The support team for IBM Connections could be much better in proactive support issues by sending us the information they experienced with other customers.
Yes
Yes we have reported many bugs and all of them were resolved to satisfaction. Some of them need some more time and persuasion from our side to get what we want :-) but in the end we always got what we needed to leave us with a satisfied feeling.
During a migration weekend we had some issues with database migration scripts. We called IBM Support and within 30 minutes they found us a real DB2 expert which led us in the right direction regarding how things could be solved (in the end it seemed a 2 play problem where some kind of configuration setting (which we had of course) triggered a bug within DB2) so after we found out about this we disabled the config setting ran the migration scripts and enabled the config setting again. In the end everybody was happy :-)
  • The homepage functionality is very elegant to use.
  • Creating of communities and their functions is very easy to do.
  • Connections the Mobile client is straight forward.
  • The rich text editor of IBM Connections could get some improvements of copy/paste actions.
  • Getting an insight within the platform on the items you do follow and the items yo do not follow is quite cumbersome.
Yes
There are 2 ways of consuming the content mobile. One way is via a responsive web browser UI. This is quite good. Be the better option would be the use of the native mobile client delivered by IBM.
Overall seen the useabilty of IBM Connections is fairly easy. The ramp UP time speed is quite low for end users to understand how they can use it in their day to day business environment.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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)
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.
  • Better exchange of ideas
  • More cohesiveness among members of departments who are geographically separated.
  • Greater ability for multiple departments to share information.
  • Novell Vibe,MS SharePoint
At the time we were evaluating collaboration tools we weren't sure if our users were ready for it or not. As such we wanted to purchase a product where the users could get the feel for collaboration without making a huge software and infrastructure commitment in case they would not buy into it. Connections filled the need perfectly. Since we were an IBM shop already it made even more sense. The best thing is that Connections has continued to meet our collaboration needs even though it has caught on greatly with our user community and demand increases every day. We will continue to use Connections despite other larger more expensive options are out there.
Connections has continued to more than meet our needs from a collaboration point of view and we are currently working on integration with our IBM Websphere portal platform to provide an integrated collaboration solution. This scenario will provide our users the best both products have to offer in a single interface.
Yes
We have contracted with an IBM partner for additional development and support work.
We ran into a few unique issues that took some time to resolve.
Yes
Yes.
  • Event creation and integration with Outlook
  • Forums
  • Blogs
  • Activities
Yes
I think the app is very good. Most people find it more straight forward than the desktop version.
Most functions are fairly straight forward and the online help can any most questions.
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