HCL Connections Reviews

The most valuable feature is definitely Files. We have totally transferred the way we work, or developed the way we work on information. The ability to upload files into the cloud, the sharing options, and, even better, the commenting options and the @ mentions on the file just eases the workflow dramatically compared to using email and sending attachments back and forth.

It saves a lot of time, includes more people that need to be included and it ensures better quality.

I’m happy with what I saw at a recent conference regarding Connections Pink and Orient Me.

We have had no downtime.

Scalability is okay-ish. We are more or less satisfied with the way it works. No major need for fixing it.

Technical support is great.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because we got advice from our business partner and from IBM that opened up our eyes to see the options out there.

Initial setup was complex. We suffered some setbacks on the migration from the on-prem solution to the cloud. We are currently in a hybrid solution and the migration didn't work exactly how it was supposed to; so we had some challenges on migrating.

We looked at Microsoft.

Quality and cost are the most important factors when selecting a vendor.

Just do it.

The most valuable feature is Files, because we are working together with our accounting department in different countries.

It's much easier to have control of what's been done and what's not been done. We can even write comments on the board, and again get all the updates when something has been done.

For instance, when you open a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, you just get a copy of it; you can't put it up again.

Stability is perfect.

I have not used technical support.

I wasn't actually involved in the initial setup.

When looking for a vendor, price is the most important factor for us.

Just do it right now.

I use it mainly for my files. I've got pretty much all my personal files and shared files in there. I use it on a day-to-day basis - the Activities part - for managing my work and the work of our teams, the scrum teams and the agile teams. We are able to see where we are in the process for everything that we have to deploy. I also use it for finding people or connecting with people and communicating.

For me, the benefit is that I have it on my mobile device, because I work a lot on mobile. I've got a lot of different devices and I work in a lot of different locations and most of the times in meetings. For me, it's easy to always be able to reach my files. Everything is on hand all the time.

For once, I would like to see better support for files. I mean, file storage is very good. It's not a concept of traditional file storage, but I figure if you want to make a transition from a traditional way of working into a new way of working, the gap between the old way and the new way, should be a little bit smaller.

I think it's very stable.

Scalability is also very good.

Technical support is good.

We had a lot of solutions and what we wanted to do was not invent a new solution or bring a new one in. We wanted to combine the solutions we already had and integrate them into a real social enterprise collaboration platform. That's why we use Connections as kind of an umbrella over all the solutions.

Initial setup was complex. It is a large-scale WebSphere deployment, and we have a twin data center, so you have to do a lot to deploy it at a very big enterprise.

We looked at everybody in the enterprise social space. We looked at Microsoft, but Microsoft wasn't that big; Jive; we looked at pretty much everyone. We did a full analysis.

When selecting a vendor, the integration between current solutions and the new solutions is important, as is the integration between different vendors. Pricing is also important, of course. Also, the social features and the completeness.

Do a comparison of the different solutions, and really look into what your use cases are and how you want to use them. Especially, look a bit forward, for example, whether you want to be dependent on one vendor or to have multiple vendors and integrate them. I think Connections is a pretty good choice but it depends on where you're coming from and what your current installed base is.

The most valuable features of Connections would be that it opens up communication silos that previously existed in the company. Instead of everybody working in this little box, it opens it up across the enterprise so that people have the opportunity to discover talents and interests in other areas that may not pertain to their normal job function.

The benefits are, first and foremost, we get to find out exactly what other business units are doing in the company. You work for a company for a long time, but you don't know what everybody else does. You get to find out, "Oh, these are other things that are happening," and it happens in real time. Once someone in a business unit posts something, you get to find out about it if you follow them. Another benefit is that it exposes you to people with other talents and disciplines that are not their normal job function. That's not what they were hired for, but they have that skill set that you can call into play, either as a reference or as a resource.

They seem to be implementing some of what we want in the upcoming versions, like an onboarding wizard. Having an easier way to integrate with other third-party tools would be really helpful. Right now, depending on the tool, it's easier or harder to integrate than it could be. That's probably one of the bigger things.

Support has got to know what they're doing. They got to have a good product, and the product has to work. We've dealt with a number of vendors for products that integrate with Connections. They advertise one thing, and it just doesn't work as advertised. It seems like everyone's in a rush to get something to market without being thorough in their testing and QA. They release a product, and that's something else that IBM is kind of bad about. They release a product that's not quite ready for prime time just so they can say, "Okay, we hit a deadline. We released it on this date." I guess in the backrooms they're thinking, "Well, we'll fix it in the next two quarters." We see the same thing with some third-party vendors.

We've been using it now for, probably, three years.

So far, it's very stable, depending on your implementation of it. We've been at it now for, probably, three years. The stability and the capability is getting better with every version.

It seems to be capable of scaling. We haven't had to scale it that much, because we did a mass rollout all at once, and our company is not growing that fast. I see where the potential for scalability is very good, because of how we built it.

Support needs improvement. The product seems to be released with a lot of bugs. Of course, IBM has multiple layers of technical support. The lower levels of technical support are somewhat clueless about how to support this product, so it takes a lot longer to get to somebody who does know what they are doing than I think it should. That's probably the most frustrating aspect about supporting a product so far. Hopefully they're going to improve that. We've been told that they're implementing different training programs within the infrastructure. It remains to be seen.

We didn't previously have anything else. Through marketing material, we saw what the capabilities are. Management had the foresight to recognize, "Okay, this could change the way that we do business or we do work," and it has.

We didn’t consider any other tools for the connection solution in general.

Do your research. Don't skimp on marketing within the company, in terms of adoption. Invest heavily in adoption strategy, because you can put it out there and it will be great for a week because it's new and shiny. But unless you have a serious plan for adoption, your utilization is going to drop off like a cliff if you don't have a staged plan of keeping adoption rates high and incentivizing people.

For us, the most valuable feature is really the threaded conversations, because we don't get a threaded conversation with other tools. We are looking at a two-way dialog and how we can help enable that.

For us, at this point, it opens up a door to large broadcasted messages, and larger forms of engagement.

For us, the biggest thing we would like to see in the next release is integration with SharePoint.

We've had some load time and performance issues with concurrent users. The page was just not coming up.

We haven't run into scalability issues, just because we don't really have high usage, overall.

I have not used technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Have business-level use cases before anything else. Also, think about integration, and where you want to integrate, and then also just basic usability.

I really like the files and the wikis, since we use that heavily in my department. Throughout the company, obviously there are different advantages for the different departments. Our sales staff is using the Activities to attract various implementation projects starting from the earliest phases in the sales process and all the way through to the delivery/final installation.

But for me personally, I love being able to collect our departmental knowledge and put it in a central place that we can look it up, so that we don't have to keep resolving the same kind of problems.

In regards to the Files application, just having a really simple way to track important files and do version control on them, as well as share them out easily, has proven to be very valuable.

Actually, I'm seeing all the previews for the IBM Connections version 6 product and I think a lot of the stuff that we would like is coming out in that version itself.

One of our VP of sales has asked for the ability to sync nested folders by using the drag and drop option, and that's going to be in there. There are some of the Community design elements, the top menu, which is something that a lot of our employees have been asking for.

So, it seems that IBM is listening to people when it comes to including new features in the latest Connections product line.

It is not as stable as I would like it to be. But, mostly it is a lot more complicated than the Domino platform that we've been on for many years and because of that, with more moving parts, there are more things that can go wrong.

Overall, it is a pretty solid product. We don't have a whole lot of issues with it. Also, IBM has generally worked to try and get any of those issues resolved through their feature packs and fix packs.

We're on the latest release, so obviously at this stage, there are more problems than if you're a little bit farther behind.

We're a very small company and we have 215 employees worldwide. I know there are sites that are running hundreds or thousands of people in the system so, obviously, it scales up very well.

We have drastically overbuilt our on-premise installation for redundancy purposes - multiple HTTP servers, multiple Apps servers, multiple Docs servers, etc, and aren't really hitting any performance problems with the environment we have, but we can obviously always add more resources- more cores, more
RAM, or even more servers in general if it's needed to better support the
application.

There are some people that are better than others. There are some really good and sharp people at the backend of the support side, while there are some others that we prefer not to deal with, if possible.

Our CEO is a visionary and he is always looking for a new and better way to do things. When he first saw the Connections product, it was probably about 6-7 years ago. With him, it just sort of clicked, as it was something that he could use in the business to help drive us to that next level with internal collaboration. So, he went ahead and pulled the trigger on it and it's been a slow adoption. A lot of it was trying to get all the other department heads to see the same things that he saw, and that I was able to see.

Now, we're starting to get a lot more traction to it, i.e., once we get each department to solve their specific concern for the system, such as what they're not happy with, which generally turns into what they don't understand and need some additional training on. It's been really good.

The setup was extremely complex; a little less than what it may have been in the past. We've been a Connections user ever since version 3. We're on-premise and there's a lot of documentation that is wrong more often than not. Also, it's a very cumbersome process that often takes us about 4-6 months to get an upgrade completed, tested and ready to roll out. Thus, I feel that anything to reduce that would be appreciated. I know their new Pink strategy is supposed to help with that. I guess that we'll see when they start deploying things under that strategy.

It's absolutely worthwhile but it is not a technology project, it is a cultural project. In order to get traction on an implementation with any social system like this, you've got to get the culture on board, before you roll out the technology. Otherwise, it's just viewed as yet another tool, that some people are going to use and some aren't.

The product's scalability, ease of use and completeness of vision are important criteria whilst selecting a vendor. One thing that I really have to give to IBM is that they do have a really good vision on what they are trying to accomplish and they're taking the product to that point. If you look at some of the competitors out there, they don't really seem to have this idea in their mind as to what they are trying to do exactly. A lot of it is, throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks or by just trying to copy features from everyone else. However, I see with the Connections platform, IBM is trying to innovate.

The most valuable features of this solution are that it provides a space for team collaboration, sharing, security, and a standard language within the company.

I think the most benefit is with the asynchronous collaboration, drop meetings, shared files and action items. It helps the team to collaborate.

The IBM Cognitive initiative, which is an out-of-the-box feature in Connections: You don't really have to spend a lot of time with it.

It is pretty stable.

The scalability is great within the internal organization.

I personally haven't used the technical support, perhaps my company did.

Go ahead and implement it. As long as you get help from a business partner, it's not a big deal. Just plan ahead of time how to engage the user because the behavior is totally different, if they were not using something similar before.

The fee for my company's use is an important criteria when selecting a vendor.

IBM Connections Cloud gives us the opportunity to put files in one location for the people to get access to. Also, we use it in the meeting rooms this time, as it helps us with upgrading to software on-premise and its cost. It's an easier solution for us.

The meetings rooms have helped us. It's easier for people to use. It's easier for us to support. They went to the VaaS system on-premise and we didn't have any experience with that. It's just easier to use for us.

For us in the IBM Connections Cloud, we would like to use the capability for instant messages, but we need to have the groups sync up to the cloud from the on-premise, which it doesn't do at this point of time.

Also, with the file sharing option, that is where you could sync a folder; they say that this feature should be coming soon, but we haven't seen it yet.

There's good scalability because there hasn't been any limitations for us as such.

We also have a business partner that supports us. The support has been fine for us. They have helped us with the questions that we've had so far.

For file sharing, we were using Dropbox, which isn't secure, thus we would like to have something different there. With the meeting rooms, like I have mentioned before, the cost of the upgrade and the lack of expertise on the site was the reason we moved to the IBM Connections Cloud.

I was involved in the setup process to a certain degree. It was quite straightforward.

Just understand what's all there and its cost. We haven't moved any files or applications or mails yet, just because of its cost. However, you should understand what's available and what you can use out of it. Don't be afraid to just pick and choose what you need.

When we choose a vendor, we are looking for somebody with whom we can work with and who doesn't speak a language that goes over our heads. In other words, a vendor that speaks our language and that assists us with what we need.