IBM Connections on-premises: Excellent, but SMBs may want to look at the cloud version instead.
Updated December 10, 2015
IBM Connections on-premises: Excellent, but SMBs may want to look at the cloud version instead.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Other
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Connections
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).
Pros
- 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.
- IBM Connections 5.0 on-premises provided our pilot groups with better overall communications. Communities sprang up around projects, teams, departments, and even topics like new technologies. As the groups expanded their usage, they found posting Status updates, new or updated Files, and so forth really helped everyone keep up.
- Throughout our pilot we kept noticing that despite the availability of tools like Blogs, Wikis, etc., our users tended to primarily use Microsoft Office documents instead. Even "millennials" coming in expected full, native support to view and edit Microsoft Office files from the web UI. IBM Docs appears to be a suitable replacement but adds cost to the solution overall.
- Most of the admins, developers and technical support staff at our organization are heavily Microsoft-centric and find IBM software difficult to integrate, support and find training for.
- The Connections on-premises server environment is a complex one, requiring either extensive in-house skill with IBM technologies or costly consulting. SMBs should look to the cloud version instead.
We have not yet evaluated any particular products in depth; we had fully expected to move forward with Connections on-premises.
However, we have briefly looked at SmartCloud / Connections Cloud which is, of course, very similar but maintained and updated by IBM. We have also briefly looked into Office 365 which has several advantages, being (A) Microsoft Office, (B) broadly available training (live, video, etc.) and (C) enthusiastic support from most of IT and many end users. However, Office 365 is much more expensive.
HCL Connections Feature Ratings
Evaluating IBM Connections and Competitors
Yes - Well it was supposed to have replaced Lotus Quickr. Quickr becomes unsupported in 2016.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Analyst Reports
- Third-party Reviews
Price probably influenced our decision the most. About 18 months ago IBM offered us Connections licensing as an upgrade from Quickr. The cost was substantially lower than our other proposal which was to go with SharePoint on-premises. Not only was SharePoint a monster to admin but very expensive. At the time SharePoint showed lots of mixed reviews from IT and end-users alike, and no one in IT here really wanted to be responsible for the environment. SharePoint Online was also not a very strong product and Microsoft seemed to be heading into consumer-driven territory, giving us little confidence that it would improve much. Other companies using Connections reported massive time savings, reduction in email, etc., but in hindsight all of those companies were about 10x the size of our organization.
Given the timing of the market, it's hard to imagine doing it any differently. We did not have the resources to test more than one solution and IBM's seemed like a great fit. It definitely had the best pricing, making it an easy pitch for approval to move forward.
IBM Connections Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Not for Connections specifically (we only piloted it). I do have some stories for exceptional support over the years for Notes, Sametime, Quickr and Protector though!
Using IBM Connections
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Status Updates are brilliant. Always 1 or 2 clicks away.
- Profiles are really great, especially when you need to find or contact someone from the mobile app.
- File sync is super easy, and on the mobile app that's a really big thing to get right.
- Customizing Communities is pretty straightforward and IBM provides a fair amount of customization to help each Community.
- Consuming blog posts on the mobile app is a really immersive experience.
- Customizing notifications for end-users is really nice -- but it had to be enabled on the back-end (by modifying some XML file).
- Ideation Blogs are extremely helpful and easy to use.
- User adoption went very well thanks to IBM's clever implementations of common social concepts such as Liking, Following, Tags, #hashtags, and so forth.
- Wikis are weak. We wanted to see more control, more security, more presentation options, more structuring options, etc. Many wiki solutions offer a lot more flexibility. Even in the mobile app, wikis were not easy to navigate and cannot be edited.
- Working with Microsoft Office files from the web UI was a download-edit-upload process. Users were not willing to do that.
- The Windows Explorer plug-in is not as intuitive as it should be. Communities are not automatically added and Tags are not readily exposed.
- Activities are valuable but quickly get messy. A Kanban-style 3rd party implementation is much cleaner but of course costs extra.
- Software patches on the back-end are cumbersome, time consuming and the process is not entirely clear.
Yes - The mobile app is so good, users often ask me if there's a "mobile app theme" for the web version. It's THAT good. The Connections mobile app even has a "companion" app which allows users to create and modify their Microsoft Office files quickly and easily. It's not perfect but it's quite good and did not require any additional configuration (or licensing) to use.
Comments
Please log in to join the conversation