HCL Connections Reviews

The ‘Community’ feature is the most valuable. It is a good place to gather a web home page, wiki, blog, forum, file library, bookmark, tag, or @ notice.

It is a good product for making improvements across departments and in communications. People can share knowledge and files, and other people can search and learn.

• It is not easy to create a company’s Intranet home page since the home page is the first page the user lands on. IBM Connections can create many communities which link to the home page, but not the homepage itself.
• You still cannot search the contents of files inside, like words in MS Word, PowerPoint, or Adobe PDF.
• There is no project tracking function. The ‘Activity’ function is not a good feature. We need a Trello-like project management function for agile management methodology, but not only the current ProjExec function.

We have been using the solution for about eight years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give the technical support a rating of 8/10.

Previously we used IBM’s TeamRoom. We changed because IBM changed the strategy from TeamRoom to Connections.

The setup is not complex. But if you add other products together, like Sametime, it will need more customization. If people use the SaaS version, called IBM Connections Cloud, then it is straightforward.

The price should be lower. The pricing model should count concurrent users, not named users. Otherwise, a large company will be reluctant to use it as there are too many named users.

We evaluated Slack, MS Office 365, Facebook's Workplace, and Google G-Suite.

I was looking for an integrated product which is easy to use for a low price. Slack has the ‘Intranet home page’ functions, too. The per user price is higher than IBM Connections Social Cloud.

My company uses Office 365, and we can therefore use SharePoint, Yammer, and Teams for free because of our Exchange server subscription. But those functions are not integrated like IBM Connections.

SharePoint is very difficult for end-users to create Intranet home pages or departmental home pages.

Facebook's Workplace is easy to use as a consumer version, but no blog/wiki is available, like IBM Connections. But its price is the lowest.

I cannot successfully try Google G-Suite. For the initial setup step, G-Suite asked me to log in with my domain name server to prove that I own the domain name (my company’s domain name). However, I am an evaluator, and not an IT administrator, so I cannot try it.

IBM Connections is a good product with many functions. People should refer to the best practices to guide the company in how to use it. For example, when to use Blog, Wiki, Forum, Activity, Files, or Bookmark.

The Homepage/Activity Stream keeps you to up-to-date as to what is happening throughout your organization.

I like the ability to create, edit, and share files from your desktop, or mobile app, anywhere, anyplace, with everyone.

Finding expertise becomes so much easier, especially for international companies who reside all over the world.

Certain solutions aren't solely applicable for one country, but often these solutions can be re-applied to other offices as well.

Sharing knowledge on IBM Connections will give you access to tap into all the knowledge that is accessible in your organization across the world. If they find a solution for an issue in the office in Italy, the office in Sweden can reuse that solution by finding that expertise on Connections.

Activities:

• The Connections Mobile app doesn't work in the same manner as the web version. Sorting is different and not all options are available in the mobile version.
• There are limitations on how big an activity can become, but there is no functional check to let the end user know. When your activity becomes really big, it can become unreliable and very slow.
• There are no summary options for an activity. A print-to-PDF overview would be handy.
• Again, when the activity become very big, it is not easy to keep track of what happens within the activity. (Kudos Boards from ISW is a good alternative for this.)

Files:

• File sync for folders (coming in Connections 6.0)
• File sync for community files and folders
• Option to make individual files available to external users
• Option to make individual files publicly available by using a password
• Invite external users based on an email address

I have used this since the first beta came out in 2008.

In some scenarios, slow performance can be a tough point to tackle. Regarding stability, there were no issues there. Everything runs on WebSphere, which is a pretty reliable platform.

There were no scalability issues, but the effort to add extra nodes in a running configuration can be cumbersome.

Level 1 support sometimes can be a tough hurdle to tackle. Once you have reached Level 2 and Level 3 support, technical support is pretty good.

We were using Lotus Quickr. It was old, slow, and had a very small user base. There was not much potential.

The initial setup is a tough journey. Once you get the hang of it, it is pretty doable. However, it takes some perseverance.

We did not look at alternatives. We are IBM Business partners. We help customers implement IBM Connections.

Keep your eyes open for IBM Connections 6.0 and the future version of Connections, Connections Pink. This version will move away from the IBM technology stack and take the route of micro-services. Connections will enter the world of Docker, MonogDB, Node.js, CFC, Redis, Muse, etc.

The complete software will be rewritten for this new technology. Also, the on-premises implementation will depend on the cloud offering. Updates will be seamlessly pushed towards your on-premises deployment. This technology will make big, clunky upgrade projects become a thing of the past.

This depends on which department you're operating in as different departments use different features. I use it for projects a lot. If you consider HR, they use it for personnel files, staff policies etc.

The solution is useful for team engagement and team collaborations, so that everyone is working together towards the same objective and we are using the best practices among ourselves, sharing and craft sourcing.

I think it's a lot to do with metrics and in order to push up the momentum and get people to use it more, I need to know what's happening exactly in a more detailed kind of metric. So, if there are any problems identified exactly where it's not going wrong, this would help to understand how I can push it and what incentive I can put there.

Also the interface could be more easily accessible and easy to read as currently the interface is not.

In order to monitor the usage and encourage take up I need like a dashboard to know where things are good and where we are not picking up as we should and react accordingly.

The stability is good.

It isn't so scalable really as we keep changing providers.

The support is a bit difficult as we need to get into contextual details before they can solve an issue, otherwise it can take a while.

The setup was complex. Integrations were an issue and several things went wrong such as identification, credentials etc. So we had to redo the whole thing because a lot of features were not working. So, instead of actually migrating we had to do a fresh installation.

It provides very potent document sharing with very good integration with the Microsoft desktop and smart phones. It includes a good feature set with Facebook-like features. It provides a very complete feature set if used together with IBM Sametime to replace desktop sharing and meetings. The feature set gives a pretty complete and easy to use social platform. The entry barrier for business users is low with little training needed.

We are able to integrate global units and have hierarchy-free communication. Teams on multiple sites are able to collaborate on customer projects and internal initiatives.

The product has a pretty flat structure for communities; they are in principle a long list. This gets easily overcrowded and lacks structure/guidance. Tagging is strong, but this may deserve a little bit more.

The platform allows to create communities for collaboration. This is a central feature and very good. It also has a low barrier and is easy. In a large organization, the number of communities increases swiftly. This is like a manila folder containing important information. One after the other with a title page. How is this organized? In a large pile? This did not work in libraries and there are concepts to deal with this.

Connections has only the concept of a large pile. There is obviously good search, but that does not solve the issue as the results depend on words and tagging.

Web pages have the idea about meta data to feed the search engines and this is called SEO as a service offering. This does not work, if communities are not forced to tag our use common titles.

I would prefer if the community element would allow (out of the box) a high degree of structure to allow a navigation.

This is similar to the question, if one searches on the internet via Google 'full text search' or an 'editor list' like Yahoo used to have. Connections is the Google way and it needs to have a Yahoo directory-like component.

After all, it is an enterprise tool and enterprises have a structure with the need of structured information.

I have been using the solution for six months.

Excellent technical support and documentation. Questions raised during security audits (an unfriendly one) were answers swiftly and comprehensively.

We did pilot SharePoint and moved to Connections due to licensing costs, lack of features and the bad reputation of SharePoint in our market.

Setup is straightforward and moderately complex. I would advise to get some IBM consulting (we talk about days not months).

Licensing price was very competitive compared to Jive or SharePoint. Open source was not feature complete and would have caused a much more complex roll out project. This is a very “cost efficient” offering. We went from zero to pilot with business within eight weeks.

We evaluated many options and IBM was initially black listed from the selection process due to fears regarding price and complexity. We specifically evaluated Jive, SharePoint, Yammer, Drupal, Bitrix, COYO and several other low key vendors.

Use IBM Greenhouse for a test drive of Connections. This works also for Smartphones.

• Granular access control across all components provides assurance that confidential and private content stays that way. The access control model carries across to search in such a way that users only see results for content that they have privileges to access. 
• Desktop add-on makes file management easy to achieve (check-in, checkout, version management, share, etc.) 
• Community component provides users with capability to create general-purpose and topic/project specific work-group collaboration spaces (can be public or membership controlled) composed of any desired permutation of sub-set components. This includes activities (for ad-hoc to-do lists and structured task management), blogs, forums, wikis, bookmarks, files, all of which feed into a global activity feed. 
• Extra-net capability of newest release allows for third-party collaboration, e.g., with your customers. 
• Themes and skins provide basic customization. 
• API allows for full custom UI implementation if the enterprise needs that form of branding and/or customized UXP. 
• Mobile apps for android and iOS provide untethered access to connections content and components. 
• V5.5 (released December, 2015) introduced support of nested folders within the files component.

• Our project teams create community spaces to share and collaborate around content and artifacts. 
• Network file shares are now a thing of the past. There is no more tyranny of the monolithic, directory hierarchy.

While connection supports @named.user messaging and #tag.labels, the collaborative interaction UXP could be updated to a more streamlined approach for posts, file-share and threaded conversations such as that which is provided by newer teamwork offerings (e.g., Slack).

I am alluding to the potential to improve collaboration via timely, intelligently presented alerts and notifications. Specifically, I am calling out the examples within other products, such as "bots" that do your bidding and provide calls-to-action and other reminders in context with your daily activities.

We have been using the product for ten years.

Running in a self-hosted private cloud, there were no significant issues regarding stability. 

Connections is now available as a service for those who need a turnkey implementation, i.e., IBM Connections Cloud.

Scalability is a function of CPU and RAM. The file component leverages IBM FileNet under the hood for robust document management.

Here are a few of feature improvements.

IBM addresses, improves collaboration and user experience with IBM  Connections 6.0:

• Communities - Smart following; notifications; modern layouts; enhanced  rich-text content management   
• Files - Selective sync of top-level folders for offline file access; hybrid-cloud storage option adapts to workload needs

Follow @IBMSocialBiz for direct updates.

IBM Connections Profiles are the heart and soul of IBM Connections. It changes the way knowledge is shared and found by allowing users to identify subject matter experts in their organizations, from there they can either look at the knowledge and content the expert is sharing, reach out and engage with the expert directly, or even reach communities of experts to find the answers they are looking for. It helps the organization to be more productive, reduces the time lost when searching for information, and allows employees to build their own brand inside the organization, resulting in better talent retention and employee engagement.

IBM Connections Activities provides a platform for getting things done by allowing teams of people to collaborate and share to do’s and feedback on tasks quickly and transparently, keeping everyone informed and on the same page without the need for frequent meetings and reviews. Once an activity is successfully completed, it can be used as a “blue print” for similar activities in the future, which saves time and allows teams to have more predictable results.

IBM Connections Mobile application and plugins provide users with the ability to collaborate and share information easily from anywhere – their mobile phone, tablet, or their favourite applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.

Important information, like policies, procedures, and corporate templates, has become easy to find and has reduced wasted time and user frustration. Distribution of business reports by sharing them in IBM Connections has not only yielded the obvious result of reduced mail traffic and storage, but also allows users to engage and collaborate more effectively on these reports.

Integration with business functions and processes like internal audits has resulted in better collaboration with external parties (like auditors) and better efficiency in addressing audit findings due to open and transparent collaboration and sharing of documents and feedback (no more missed or lost emails).

Various plugins are available for Microsoft Windows desktops and this adds tremendously to the user experience.

Mac users currently only have File Sync support and no plugins are available for Linux desktop users, leaving these users heavily dependent of the web user interface. Although the web user interface works great and is constantly being improved, the plugins create a more seamless experience.

We have been using the solution for five years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

IBM provides good support, and in most cases support is available world-wide through IBM’s network of Business Partners.

IBM Connections has replaced a variety of solutions, including File Shares (shared drives), the company intranet, and the corporate directory. IT also reduced the need for various custom-developed ad-hoc solutions due to its rich set of features.

IBM Connections provides a single solution that offers profiles, communities, file sharing, wikis, blogs, surveys, activities, bookmarks, forums, ideation, activity streams and events. The product is mature, has a very strong business focus, and can be integrated with other business solutions.

Using IBM Connections and all the capabilities it offers, provides users with a single place to go for all their collaboration and knowledge sharing requirements.

Initial installation and setup of the on-premises version of IBM Connections requires specific technical skills. Once the product is installed and configured it is easy to use and users have many options to easily control their user experience.

The IBM Connections Cloud offering provides a quick and easy way to get up and running with Enterprise Social Networking without the need for technical skills and expertise.

We evaluated SharePoint and Yammer.

Work with an IBM Business Partner who has skills and expertise, not only in the installation and configuration of the IBM Connections Suite of products, but also in the implementation and adoption of Enterprise Social Networking and Social Business.

The deployment of IBM Connections has a much lower focus on technical skills when compared with other business solutions. The success of your IBM Connections project will depend heavily on successful integration with everyday business processes and activities and user adoption.

Becoming a successful business using IBM Connections is a journey which requires careful planning and guidance, but the rewards are absolutely worth the effort.

There are multiple applications available for the user.

• The blogs became the main source of information for the organisation and establishing dialogue.
• The forums are the best places to get and provide peer powered support.

Design and user experience.

Design: They present consistent shortcomings across their applications. For instance, when you are in a sub-community, it's difficult to figure out what other sub-communities are a part of the parent community. Whenever you land in a sub-community application, it's difficult to navigate to the parent one.

Another example is how the newsfeed tries to provide you with extra information with a blurb hovering to the right. However, it's actually the same information available on the newsfeed item.

User experience: The many ways in which you could use their different applications is, for most users, simply overwhelming.

IBM Connections can be a really good product for power users. However, for most of my users, the consistent feedback has been about how difficult it is to use and how the interface is poorly designed.

I used the solution for about two years, from 2013 to 2015.

The forums struggled to keep up when multiple users posted information.

I am not aware of any issues regarding scalability.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

The setup was rather simple. IT handled most of the implementation. The functional owner designed a series of standard communities for everyone to join.

Using IBM Connections as a standalone product to replace the intranet is not enough. Further investment is required for a landing page, either from IBM solutions, or from any of their partners.

We evaluated Jive and Yammer.

You need a strong governance model and an effective adoption strategy. If possible, do not use the IBM Connections Files app as the main CMS of the organisation.

Connections is a full-featured enterprise social network solution. Below are some of the features most used by our employees:

• Files and document management, including file sharing and libraries
• Employee profiles
• Communities
• External communities
• Blogs
• Status posts
• Activities

Connections, with its file sharing and lightweight document management capabilities, has helped us reduce the volume of email and network file usage.

Ideally, the product will increment advances from consumer social networks and file sharing tools sooner, as users expectations are formed by the software they use at home and on their devices.

We have used IBM Connections since early 2013, beginning with version 4.0. In 2015, we upgraded to version 5.0. Throughout, we have used the on-premises solution.

In 2016, we extended the platform to external users via external communities.

We have not had any stability problems.

We have not had any scalability problems.

We used a variety of business partner support models and have been pleased with the support.

Prior to Connections, we did not have an enterprise social network solution.

Like any major software implementation, the initial project required planning, resource allocation, vendor management, and communications.

Learn and understand the different product offerings and pricing models and note the difference between cloud, hybrid, and on-premises solutions.

We evaluated Jive and SharePoint.

Do your research and look for the solution that best fits your organization. Ultimately, enterprise social network adoption will be about culture and fit, and not the technology.

We have Connections 4.5, which is an older version. It does have some features that help people to collaborate in the same community.

There are newer versions that are integrated with Watson and some other features, and that might bring a lot of valuable features. For example, you can really collaborate in multiple channels, using Connections, so whether it's cognitive collaboration, or file or content collaboration, it makes it much easier.

From the sharing perspective, it is very clunky. It's very hard to share files and very hard to share content. It is not intuitive in the way it is. It doesn't provide the documentation baseline collaboration, so we're actually moving away from Connections. There are newer versions, but in today's world, with the version that almost everybody uses, it's very, very hard to use.

It's stable.

It's scalable.

I don’t personally use it, but the company uses support all the time.

We needed some collaborative software and space, and IBM is our shop. So, you know what they say, “even our blood is blue”; everything's IBM. Apparently, it didn't make it all the way, so we actually are moving to Microsoft.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup.

Go with the latest version and get everything integrated.

It is the single quickest way for us to start consolidating all of our files together when we are going to many countries.

Communication is a benefit. The challenge with it is whether or not it's a monetary benefit.

There's nothing pressing for us about Connections itself at the moment that we are desperate for that we don't already see in version 6. The biggest benefit for us will be nested folders. Until we get nested folder support, folders within folders, we can't move away from the historical file stores on Windows.

We have it on premise, so we control the stability. We have had issues with tuning and configuration. The best practice isn't always clear about how to configure it and make it work when it scales. We control the tin, but I'd say that probably there's a gap at the moment in best practice recommendations.

When we went from 1,000 users to 2,000 users, we hit some problems and then it required a lot of retuning and reconfiguration.

When you get to the right person in technical support, they are very good. The challenge is finding the people who understand it. There are probably about 50 people around the IBM world that can deal with the level of detail we sometimes go into but getting hold of them is quite challenging.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

The product itself is good, probably best in its class still, but the solution brings it down. They don't approach it as delivering a solution to a customer. They look at it as a product that then you work with. And they're making a big mistake there.

Get a good partner that understands how to implement it and don't expect that IBM can respond quickly enough. Make sure that if you buy the product and you use the product, that you've got a partner that can fully manage it for you. Don't expect there to be rapid releases. If there are gaps in functionality, be very clear that you probably won't get them within 18 months.

When selecting a vendor, trust is the most important criteria.