HCL Connections Reviews

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.

Some of the valuable features in this product are:

• Profiles – It is easy to find people with similar tech skills and reach out to them internally for a project requirement. Project managers find it easy to know who in the organization possesses a skill that matches the requirement.
• Community - Access to projects and their data remains within the group and all other Connections' functionalities are included internally as a feature, which is great.

Initially, only our technical team used this product for mainly two purposes - One as file sharing and the other was Communities. However, now our HR team has also started using it, to know more about the employees and their skill levels.

Development of more customized widgets as per the organization’s requirement is one area, which if improved, will attract even those employees who don't use this product often.

I have used this product for more than four years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would give the technical support a 4/5 rating.

Previously, we also had another wiki solution to manage project documentation for sharing with other teammates. But, we found wikis in IBM Connections can be used in the same way and hence we decided to move out.

As the version of the product moves up, the complexity of setup also increases, with many other features getting added.

This is not something that I manage.

We did not evaluate other options prior to his product.

The infrastructure team needs a skilled, technical person who is familiar with this product.

The most important feature of IBM Connections is that it is a Social Collaboration suite covering nearly all aspects of modern enterprise communication and collaboration. As a comprehensive set of Enterprise 2.0 tools, Connections can serve many purposes in an enterprise and so be useful for many people inside. It is therefore superior to any single-purpose tools that sometimes might be better in specific functions, but are only useful for a small group. The reduction of information silos is one of the most important challenges enterprises are facing today and it can only succeed if everybody in the enterprise is using the same platform for open communication and collaboration.

The whole organization benefits from one of the most important key features of Connections: It provides context to everything either by organizing related information, data and files in communities or by simply adding tags to persons and all kinds of data. Context also means that conversations and discussions happen exactly where they belong and not somewhere else (e-mail, phone, ...).

The wiki is the weakest part of Connections, compared to standalone wiki solutions. It does not offer customizable templates for pages, a feature users often ask for. I would love to see improvements in this area.

I have used it since 2007.

I have not really encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. Stability and scalability are excellent due to the underlying platform, IBM WebSphere. Deployment on premises takes between 3-5 days and requires good, skilled and experienced technicians. Deployment in the IBM cloud is easy. Major upgrades on premises are sometimes challenging and should only be done by experienced technicians.

Technical support is good, but could be better, as always.

Previously, we mainly used email, which for collaboration purposes has a lot of disadvantages: It has no structure (personal email folders are not a collaboration tool), it is highly redundant, you neither know the status or the context of a message and finally, it is another silo. Sharing is way more efficient than distributing.

Initial setup is complex because you have to deal with installation and integration of several systems: WebSphere Application Server, HTTP server, relational database, LDAP, Tivoli Directory Integrator for syncing user data between LDAP and Connections, IBM Cognos for BI, e-mail integration.

We provide implementation of Connections as a service and did it ourselves.

Some IBM business partners offer very attractive prices if you combine Connections licenses with one of their add-on solutions.

IBM Connections is a software product but deploying Connections is not mainly an IT project. You should know WHY you are deploying it and which GOALS you want to achieve with it. Otherwise, it will fail even if the infrastructure is running perfectly.

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.

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.

Its ability to collaborate, keep track of all the updates in one place is great. The ability to search the content, make every content searchable and the ability to share with the external parties are the most important features.

Going back to its ability to search, I think it is the biggest benefit that you have in your organization, because traditionally organizations tend to keep content in different locations, and what Connections does is, it brings all of that content together and gives you the capability to do full search of that content based on the context that you are looking for.

I think a little more of an integration with the calendaring features would be better. Right now, you don't have a direct integration for doing connections in your personal calendar. That's the feature that people are looking for, so I think that would help.

It is a very stable solution, because we have done both on-premise as well as the cloud part of it, and traditionally, from the Connections standpoint, there have been no outages.

Until now, we haven't had any challenges in terms of its capability to handle the user base.

At times, technical support is a challenge. As long as you get in good hands, you are good.

I was involved in the setup. It is complex. The way IBM sets up its product, you can never find one thing in one place. Everything that you need is not found in one single location, so now you have to start at one place, then say, "Oh, you need to go to another location to find another content," then you come back and you start all over again.

Some of the recommendations are good, but unless they collaborate well together, - as these are all products placed together into one single solution, unless they bring that all together - it will remain complex. That's my thought.

I would definitely recommend it. You need to accept that this solution has a big learning curve for organizations that are not tech savvy. However, once you accept it, you will definitely start seeing its benefits.

I like the centralized locations for everything, like file sharing, email, and meetings; having all that in one easy-to-access location versus having several different areas that you have to go out and bookmark, and having to leave the site each time. That might take a little bit longer than having everything together like it is.

The ease of use has definitely improved the way my organization functions. Just having everything in one location makes work a lot simpler. There are less accounts to remember to log into, so people have to remember less passwords.

With Cloud Connections, having it online, accessing it from the internet, being able to get to it from anywhere without having to be on the network is very handy, too.

One thing that I do wish was available - and it sounded like it might be from the general side, but I'm not 100% for sure on that - is, with the Connections desktop plugin, right now, when we copy files over, we have to do it individually and create our folder structure. We can't just copy our folders over and have them all exist.

Scalability seems great from what I've been told and from what I've seen. I've never seen any outages, really, other than some planned maintenance on emails we get occasionally. Other than that, it seems great.

Scalability also seems to be pretty easily accessible. I know our rep seems to be working with us pretty well in licensing if we need to get any more but other than that, I haven't seen any issues with that.

We used technical support a couple times for basic questions, but nothing actual issue related.

I was not involved with the initial installation.

Look at IBM Connections Cloud, just because of the ease-of-use. Again, I don't know how the setup went exactly but it all seems, at least once it is set up, to run very smoothly and fluidly.

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.