HCL Connections Reviews

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.

Fully integrated solution, love the social element of Profiles, Files and Activities all securely accessed on Mobile !

Communities of practise have gained value in communicating and sharing knowledge and improving processes using e.g. Wikis

Interface, but that has had some make-over in v.5 which has now been released. Portal can complement the UI if needed I guess. Licensing !!

3 years

It's a complicated setup, but then again it's built for enterprise and volumes. Adoption is always going to be a challenge, changing the way people work. So many people are still stuck in the email paradigm. Deployment is unique per organisation.

No, but some minor browser related issues especially with Microsoft IE.

No

Customer Service: Business Partners like ourselves often run with this task. Logging of PMR's can be a lengthy bothersome processTechnical Support: Hard to say, don't often deal with technical support as mentioned, we're a Business Partner and often provide this service.

Email, improved efficiency

Complex, leave it to the experts

We're a BP so in-house

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.

Files, communities, and blogs are the most valuable features.

There is interconnectivity with all the employees of the enterprise. The possibility to share files in a unified way helps our organization. The same file can be accessed by all the employees of the enterprise just in one place.

We are watching the new IBM Connections version 6 right now; it's working right now. It would be helpful to have more interfacing of all the IBM platforms.

The stability is very good.

Scalability is also very good.

Just do it and go to the Cloud version.

Certifications are the most important criteria while selecting a vendor. The vendor has to be really helpful, stay close and work together with us.

The Files feature gives us the ability to store, share and collaborate on documents. This is, by far, the most used feature.

Helpdesk functionality is now using Forums, so people can ask and answer questions and address issues whenever they wish. Questions can be flagged as such and the correct answer identified.

The Files feature has really changed the way we do business. Instead of attaching documents to email, we send links and collaborate in the tool. This reduces the amount of email each day.

I have found the wiki to be lacking in functionality. We don’t use that piece, so we have another vendor for wiki.

I have used it for seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support has been very good.

I did not perform the setup.

I did not work on licensing or pricing.

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.

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.