HCL Connections Reviews

I think that the main tools, after file management, are Activities, Community and online documentation management with IBM DOC (embedded in the system). There are many other services such as Blog, Wiki, Forum, Survey, Chat and Conference, Audio/Video, Profiles. Those services are also important, but they are not immediately implemented because other applications or services provide that functionality.

Our customers believe that Activities, Community and IBM DOC are the features that provide particular value.

All files managed by my team are generated directly in Connections, initially as personal files but shared with each other. Ultimately, files are moved into the community for reference and so shared with all members of the team.

All technical documentation is written in the wiki, which is now the central point of reference about everything necessary to work, both on the project and knowledge sharing.

The improvement's are could be more flexibility to manage files and to have a sync file area more intuitive and which respects the characteristics of other similar solutions. That feature should be also only for personal files.

I have used IBM Connections on premise since its birth. I have used IBM Connections Cloud for three years.

All versions are developed on WebSphere Application Server. When we have a well-done installation and configuration, I can confirm that it is very stable and scalable for large environments.

I have absolutely not encountered any scalability issues.

IBM support consists of several levels and we can also engage them by calling technical people directly. In some cases, IBM directly develops a fix for the system; later, this fix might become part of a future update.

Basically, I worked with IBM and the IBM Lotus product for many decades, but I also know Microsoft products, such as SharePoint, etc. I also know many new collaboration tools, but I can assert that the level of integration among the IBM products is unmatched nowadays. They are at a level that other products don't have, even if some products seem to be easier to use or more beautiful to see.

Regarding initial setup, I distinguish between the on-premise and cloud editions:

- Cloud: Everything is active immediately and you can focus directly on the product and its features.
- On premise: There is a lot of work to install and configure the environment and it depends upon which installations you need. Initial setup might be simple or complex (for example in a cluster environment, high availability, large distribution and so on).

The licensing for the two editions is more or less the same, although I think IBM solutions are cheap for the value they provide. However, the market does not seem to acknowledge this point.

As I’ve written, in the enterprise world, the competition for this product comes from Microsoft and its solutions. I do not think that integration with all services is optimal for Microsoft today. So, I chose IBM Connections and the IBM collaboration tool turned things around.

Adoption is the key that makes the difference. If you install/use it without a clear adoption plan, this solution becomes a Black Hole, which is the case for all kinds of these solutions.

We have developed a system of adoption for both solutions, and I think that in most cases, the cloud solution of IBM Connections will be the best choice. The on-premise edition is useful only if you require significant customisation and integration with internal legacy applications.

IBM Connections is born for collaboration and one of the easiest steps is starting a community with a set of great collaborative, built-in applications and starting to collaborate over a project. When a user starts a community, activity, blogs, files, and wikis will be instantly available for the team community with their intuitive GUI. Users can use the platform from browsers, mobile, or a desktop plugin within a minute!

It increases productivity. One example is using files inside Connections. You don’t have to manually go looking for a file in a folder somewhere. You can search for it with the internal search engine or you can search inside the relevant community.

Connections has a feature named Docs that enables online co-editing of Office documents.

The perfect software doesn't exist, but I think Connections is really a good piece of software with few things lacking. Probably they should also build a Windows Phone client app.

Also, IBM could develop an easy way to install the Connections platform. Currently, many steps are required and involving a skilled IBM Business Partner is mandatory for successful setup.

I've been using Connections for four years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Pre-installation steps should also include a plan for deployment to size the correct environment.

Nope IBM Connections is running over WebSphere application server so it is usually up and running

Nope, Connections runs over IBM WebSphere Application server so you have only your fantasy as limit, you can cluster Connections in many differents ways

IBM technical support is great.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup is usually quite complex, but Connections is a set-and-forget environment.

An in-house team implemented it, because we are an IBM Business Partner.

I think anyone can find ROI using Connections, but they have to drive users during the initial stages.

Find an IBM Business Partner with experience and start to plan your environment.

All social interaction between users is really great. Plus, I also like the Community feature and that everything is accessible via mobile devices.

This product should have a way to mark Communities as favorites for quick access.

I have used this product for five years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

The technical support level is good, both from the community and from IBM.

Previously, we have not used any other solutions.

The installation process is a bit complex. However, IBM's documentation is good and there are step-by-step installations guides that you can use.

We have not evaluated any other options, prior to this one.

It is really important to have a plan on how to be successful with the implementation and adoption of this platform in your organization. You can't just install it and tell users to go ahead. Using this product as a transparent social platform where you share you work with others, is often a new way to work in most organizations.

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.

• Wikis and Files: Work well for process documentation and reference material.
• Blogs: Used for department announcements.
• Bookmarks: Used on communities and on the staff’s “my page” to access frequently used links.

Connections has assisted our business area with our Knowledge Management
initiative. It provides us with a tool that the staff can use to quickly find the information needed to process their day-to-day tasks and assist our customers. It has also been valuable as a collaboration tool within our area and encourages our reps to participate within the community to ask questions and share their expertise.

For our Knowledge Management initiative, it would benefit to have capabilities within the tool to have one single source of information that allows access to the information needed based on the user’s role within the organization. We have seen other KM products that offer this feature.

The editors that are supported by the product each offer features that would be useful, but there isn’t one editor that offers all of the desired features.

We originally implemented 3.0 in 2011 but most recently upgraded to 5.5 on 10/3/16.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

IBM scheduled weekly - sometimes bi-weekly - meetings to review the status with open PMRs. They also provided on-site support during the final migration before our “go-live” date.

The support provided through PMRs was helpful, though there were some issues with incomplete, confusing, and incorrect information within the installation documentation.

Also, the support provided was based on the level of the PMR. The level 3 PMRs were handled at a more detailed level, while the level 2 PMRs often required us to provide basic background information and other details that had previously been provided through working other PMRs. These PMRs were more lengthy and repetitive, and required additional fiddler trace reports.

We were looking for a KM platform that was easier to use and included social collaboration.

The setup was more complex, as it was not an initial setup but rather an upgrade, which required migration from MSSQL to DB2.

For pricing, look to see if it is site licensed, or by unit. A unit can be users, core, etc. Are there costs to run this as a cold site, in the event of a D/R situation? Are there volume discounts involved? Look at competing products that do similar functions and compare pricing. Look to see if you have corporate discounts.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Yammer and SharePoint.

I recommend taking advantage of any offers for IBM staff to come onsite for adoption workshops for the staff using the platform. This was a helpful step in our rollout to the staff. I would also recommend that they be prepared to provide ongoing support after rollout, to be successful with adoption and to ensure that the staff has the information they need to be comfortable with navigating in the tool.

• File versioning
• Variety of content and file types that a user can share (images, gif, documents, embedded videos, and so on)
• Valuable search to find archived documents

The platform allows in a very easy way to create community and start collaborating. This value has been easily recognized by the users, above all for managing cross-department projects.

Some departments had a latent need of communication inside the company and they are now starting organizing autonomously, managing their own communities, spreading news and launching surveys. Nevertheless, this result was made possible only with a custom application, able to notify specific users punctually. This particular behaviour that is not provided by the platform, being a social platform, is however a basic need for every company, that has the task to inform its employees and be certain about their reception of the most important messages.

The management of technical projects was facilitated by the creation of communities in which the internal customer of the project and technical teams were able to work on the same project together, although not part of the same hierarchical department.

The platform is too dispersive and rigid. It should improve in usability and user interface customization by the user (personalized menu, communities to keep close at hand, always available files, and so on).

There are too many applications that might be replaceable with each other. Excessive opportunities of choice make adoption difficult. You find it difficult to choose the best ways to make sharing actions. For example:

• Sharing of a file: From my personal files and then sharing it to specific communities or directly inside a community?
• Communication inside a community: Should I use the status updates of the community or blog or forum?

Having tools that are able to manage slightly different shades of communication purposes is not always an advantage. A common user often feels disoriented and induced to use simpler tools.

Moreover, the status updates section in a community remains completely hidden. By contrast, if we want to read the recent status updates, we can no longer see other applications available only in the general view. We are used to a unique landing page in every collaborative group, in which we can see immediately recent conversations (LinkedIn and Facebook groups are both structured in this way).

These problems can be overcome by governing the initial stage of installation and choosing in advance which applications to release and when.

My company has been adopting Connections since January 2013.

Episodes of instability are not uncommon. For this reason, talking about on-premise installations, it is essential to have a good technical partner, if it is not possible to acquire internally the specific technical competence.

We had issues with scalability, including the need to increase the maximum weight of the files and the limit of the size of the community, but they were quickly handled.

We are not completely satisfied with the technical support. The platform often presents product weaknesses and bugs. In the first case, the issues are managed superficially, defined as "product characteristics". In the second case, it is almost impossible to solve problems quickly. We are now directly facing this problem with a specific bug that remains unresolved.

We had tested Yammer before introducing seriously an enterprise social collaboration platform. We preferred IBM Connections because we saw in it the greatest potential in managing different types of communications to pursue different purposes over time.

Initial setup was almost straightforward; handled directly from IBM.

I would recommend that everyone adopt the cloud version. There is too much constant maintenance to be performed on the on-premise version that does not allow focusing on adoption strategies.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Yammer, Jive, Social Chatter, and Tibco.

I recommend internal testing of the functionality of the platform to understand the pros and cons compared to the modes of interaction and cooperation that already exist in the company. Then, I would proceed migrating one or two existing processes, launching a driven pilot that should involve an entire team / department. I would strongly recommend a gradual release of applications and training dedicated to each instrument. The platform is too complex to be used entirely from the start.

The most valuable feature is communities. You are able to manage your team / organization and also cross-team projects. It is very easy to use and provides a central place for your team.

Especially in a distributed organisation like us, it helps to enhance collaboration and gain faster business results. It connects experts from different areas. It also helps to find the right people for a project faster and more efficiently.

Organizational improvements like easier collaboration and Meeting culture are immediately available. But it has also a strong mobile component which is very important for us. It provides for example local sync of documents on iPad etc.

The different Features (Blog, Wiki, Forum, ...) do not behave equally e.g. how they handle files or links. This should be improved by IBM. Also the mobile Interface (app) is good but not state-of-the-art. Workflow Features can be implemented using IBM's Forms Experience Builder but this is an additional product with additional costs. Could be improved as well. The web editor has been improved but there is always room for more Features and Functions.

6 years

No, each upgrade needs to be planned but it is no rip-and-replace product (like others). It also runs on differnt OS platforms and web Browsers.

No

No, it is very scalable

Like each new product you need to know what you do with it and how to implement it. But it is not too complex.

We did the implementation by ourselves

There a bundles available containing other IBM Solutions. This could be worth looking in. Cloud is also available if required.

It is much easier to use like MS SharePoint/Yammer or Jive.

• Business contacts network: You can define a business network like LinkedIn, but limited to your installation. You can also view the organizational chart inside the tool.
• Communities: One of the best functionality of the product. Complete functionalities.
• Automatic notifications: Users receive notification of all activities done on Connections. When files created, modified, ..., the platform advise users of some of the contents within the function of the role and the past activities. Users can also decide the way in which notifications are sent (they can filter the type of event and also the timing).

Marketing has created a community open to all internal employees where it has centralized all marketing content (brochures, presentations, communications).

Compared to the past, now we have a single point of interest where all content is available, and all employees receive a notification when new content is published. In addition, all employees can provide feedback and a personal impression about all shared content.

File management: File management is a little poor. For example, you don’t have the ability to create a folder or organize the contents of a folder. Some functionalities are available only if the customer also buys the IBM FileNet platform.

User management: Users are mainly on LDAP. There is no way to create a user “on the fly” and to add it to a community or business network. You must track all users on LDAP before interacting with them and this is very boring, especially if you have to interact with external users.

I have used it for two years.

I had some problems on earlier releases; in 4.5, I’ve only noticed some browser incompatibilities.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 8/10.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup has been simple.

Pricing is not so “easy to access”; licencing is for a single user.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

It’s very important to understand what you want to do with “social” before implementing something on the platform.

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.

I understand this is about IBM making money. But I want all the features/capabilities in the base package. For example, one thing I don’t have is the IBM Connections full-documentation solution (FileNet). If I did, I could get rid of our use of SharePoint. Or at least greatly reduce it.

I have used it for three years.

This is not my area of expertise, but from what I see, we have absolutely not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. I work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, specifically one agency of USDA called the Natural Resources Conservation Service. There are 15-20 other agencies using this product. The ability for USDA to use this as a whole and communicate between agencies has been good, along with the ability for each agency to use it to communicate within its own agency.

Technical support is excellent. I’m sure this isn’t the norm, but because I am assuming that USDA is a large customer, we get a business and IT customer rep that checks with us on a regular basis.

Our use of IBM Connections is a case of, it’s better to be lucky than good. I do not believe we did any requirement-gathering from the business end or evaluation of other IT products.

This is not my area of expertise, but we have an in-house team that did the implementation. Technically, I believe some of that in-house team are contractors, and some are employees.

I am not involved with the ROI aspect either, although I have some awareness of it. My only advice is to negotiate hard for what you want. Know all the capabilities of the product, and sacrifice what you don’t need for what you do. For example, Connections comes with a chat service. We have that and I assume pay for it. But we really don’t need it, as we have Skype. What I really could use is the more comprehensive docs capabilities.

Sell the time-saving aspect of this to any leadership. Less email. Way less email. Less IT help desk support needed. A little use of Connections in its place.

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.