HCL Connections Reviews

The ability to have all business owners own, author, and manage content and communications is very valuable. I can use Connections and eliminate use of other software/tools, and it greatly reduces my need for IT support for simple requests. If talking about specific capabilities that make this possible, the integration of email and Connect is a huge time saver. With that, the ability to manage your community/email membership saves time. I don’t need to go to some IT staff or process to update community/email membership.

I have other business users in Connections, managing their information and communicating to 11,000 employees dispersed across the United States. I might have taken 30 minutes to train them and get them started. And that 30 minutes has allowed them to own their information, communicate it to all, receive input from all, and respond to that input. Because I spend 30 minutes training someone, I’ve gotten three years where I didn’t have to manage that information for them. Or someone else or some process didn’t have to manage that information.

I sell Connections internally by saying I can do 10 minutes of work in Connect and save an hour in email. I haven’t done a study to prove this, but I bet if I did, I’d save an hour of email for only five minutes of work in Connections, not 10. I use Connect as my knowledge base for employees. Specifically, I use the wiki capability in Connections often. I store my knowledge there.

Here are three examples of wiki pages. The first screenshot was a wiki set up by another employee who is the subject matter expert for the topic. She’s got files and videos stored in Connections, and then she delivers all the info via a wiki. The other two example are mine, and they also show the comment/interactive capabilities.

If I get 100 emails throughout the course of a year, I don’t have to take 5-10 minutes to answer 100 emails. I have that answer, already stored in Connections. The search capability in Connect is great and can be very specific. But even if a user can’t find something, the 30-second email to get someone to that info saves me a lot of time, rather than the 5-10 minutes it would take me to write that same email over and over.

Basically, Connections saves me time. Lots of it.

Prior to our use of IBM Connections, any internal web info had to go through a help desk process. It was time consuming. And the business owner of that info had no control or say of how that info was displayed or organized.

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.

File sharing is the number one feature. Profiles would probably be second, but I think file sharing, by far, is the most important aspect of it. I can have a document, or whatever live file I want; I can have it everywhere. It can follow me everywhere. It's like our private cloud. Then come the profiles; being able to find people.

The main benefit is ease of use. It is very easy to use.

I use HCL Connections for marketing purposes. The IBM product in our company already provides us with direct links to the marketing and HR sides.

The support is an area where the product can improve. My company faces some support-related issues because whenever we create or generate a ticket, it takes two days for the product's support team to get back to us, and then they just analyze the issue. It takes more than a week just to forward the request, and then the customer support gets back to us, which I found to be really annoying. If you are having an issue on a Monday, the support personnel will contact you next Monday.

Communities and activities are very useful for team collaboration and project level communication. This prevents breakdowns and keeps all the information in a centralized location.

It has helped us to lean towards social business, instead of just using emails as a primary mode of communication.

Connections is a social business platform whose key value is the richness of the environment, all accessed in one place, including:

• Email
• Files
• Communities
• Forums
• Instant messaging
• Activity Stream
• Blogs
• Bookmarks
• To-dos and activities
• Built-in documents
• Spreadsheet and presentation editors

This is where I go, first thing, to do my work. Everything is now in the cloud thanks to Connections.

Some of the most valuable features of the platform are:

• Communities, where we can create online communities for collaboration. This feature enables us to share expertise quickly and easily, and to generate feedback and comments.
• The new Verse email functionality, which is part of the platform, finally gives me a modern email application with a good UI.
• I value the ability to store and share files in the cloud with folder management and tagging. This makes information easier to share and find; together with a generous allowance of 50GB of personal file storage and then an additional 50GB per community (so, effectively I have unlimited space).

The directors of the company no longer use email for communication with each other. Instead, we use the Activity Stream and @mentions to collaborate and interact (plus old-school phone calls and face-to-face meetings).

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.

• Access to platform resources from all over the world
• Blogs
• Fast search of employees/groups/ communities/employees’ profiles
• Each file entered into the system has a label with the time and the name of the person who uploaded the file
• Document download is registered and visible to the system users who downloaded the file, time when it was downloaded. After updating the document, a new version is created, but previous versions are not deleted.
• List of activities to do
• Private communities with access management
• Integration with IBM Notes, Sametime.

All the features above improve collaboration among employees.

The most noticeable improvement was in the communication between the R&D department and the service department, who until now had no communication tools, despite having an email.

Employees from these departments work on different shifts, so the communication between them was difficult. The improvement in the area of cooperation has also been noticed by trade office workers who have easier access to needed and up-to-date documentation such as KRS, NIP, and REGON marketing materials.

The implemented system was very well used by the HR department. They provided training for staff from various companies among the group, set up communities with access only for training participants, where materials from the workshop and additional information was provided.

The system also helped during the setting up of a company in China. Employees engaged from different locations in Poland and China opened a community where they exchanged documentation and had discussions. This tool has certainly improved the opening of the company in China. The documentation was in one place and was available from anywhere in the world.