HCL Connections Reviews

The ability to sync my files offline and to share them with colleagues or external people is one of the more important functions. Communities are a popular way of combining blogs, wikis, files, and activities centered on a common objective or subject which proves popular and increases collaboration across people/teams. Recently, the ability to collaborate with external people such as vendors, customers, and third-parties was introduced, which allows us to collaborate outside of network in a secure way.

We are an IBM business partner with circa 80 employees in the UK, India, and home workers. I've found that it increases communication between these dispersed people. Also, I find that I can assist others when help has not been asked for or expected by means of seeing other people's interactions. For example, on a number of occasions, sales people have been pitching to customers whom I have dealt with or had conversations with years before. I have been able to add valuable input, because I have been following the sales people, the tags, or the community where the content was discussed.

• Easier way to add external users
• Easier UI customization

We have been using this solution for over five years.

There are often deployment challenges, but often these tend to be with the integration points such as LDAP, network, single-sign-on, etc. These tend to be issues that need to be worked out together with other teams

If IBM Connections is properly tuned with the environment and load in mind, it tends to be stable.

The WebSphere middleware allows the number of nodes running the applications to be scaled horizontally and vertically with relative ease. WebSphere has been doing this for many years and is doing it very well.

Raising PMRs with IBM tends to be a little hit and miss. I personally have had good service. If you are well versed with the application and its components, then troubleshooting is much easier. Many companies see real value enlisting the services of an IBM business partner who knows the applications, the databases, and is the first port of call for problems.

From IBM, I would rate technical service as very good.

Deployment can be a little complex, but a lot of this relates to the network, corporate LDAP, and security requirements. These can have an effect on the deployment of any application. IBM Connections is a mature product and the deployment path is well trodden and more importantly, it is well documented.

I implemented our internal deployment myself and I also deployed it for customers.

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.

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.

We use the wikis extensively, along with activities for managing projects and sharing information globally.

Our productivity has increased by using IBM Connections. For example, an engineer in Asia used to feel disconnected and missed opportunities to contribute. By using IBM Connections, he was able to have visibility into challenges other engineers had in the US. Our US-based engineer was very pleased when he arrived to the office in the morning and saw some options presented by the engineer in Asia.

Our users would like to see more document management capabilities in the base IBM Connections package (without having to install extended components). Users also prefer using a traditional folder structure for organizing content and are not used to tags (might be a learning curve or resistance to change).

Our users are having difficulty grasping the concept of tags and tag clouds. They are used to placing items into folders for organization. I have attempted to explain how tags can provide the same functionality for locating content. I also showed how tags can be associated to one or more tags, which is not possible in a folder structure. I think it was resistance to change more than the inability in understanding tagging.

Without purchasing the additional add-on for document management, Connections offers the ability to make new versions, lock a file,etc. Users would also like to be able to do a check-in, check-out, and co-edit with revision control.0

I have used it for four years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

The technical support is excellent from both our vendor, The Rock Team, and from IBM support. The technical staff at IBM are very knowledgeable and addressed all support calls efficiently and expeditiously. There is always great communication and details provided for all support solutions.

Our prior tool was the SAP NetWeaver Portal. The interface for IBM Connections is much better and is better suited to support organic growth of content in an easier-to-navigate, user-friendly interface. IBM Connections provides better search capabilities for locating content.

The setup was not complex. We did have a bit of a challenge that was overcome in setting up SSO using our Microsoft Windows Active Directory.

We also considered Microsoft SharePoint. After further investigation, we realized that IBM Connections and SharePoint are very different. The social capabilities that promote organic growth among users was the strength that IBM Connections had over SharePoint. We wanted more than SharePoint’s strength with document management and deficiency in social capabilities.

User acceptance is very important. I recommend looking at the processes within an organization and then identify the alignment of IBM Connections tools to support the processes. Then, migrate users into IBM Connections in a phased approach by showing each process area the benefit of using IBM Connections to support their process. User buy-in and acceptance is improved when users can see the immediate benefit, while at the same time discovering the power of IBM Connections for other tasks.

The integration of all tools delivered by the platform itself is the most valuable feature of this product, in addition to its ability to integrate with already available default infrastructure tools within the company (like central directories (LDAP’s), load balancer infra or HTTP infra, which is already in place).

Projects we run within the company are more structured thanks to IBM Connections, our employees have really started to work more openly and projects run within the company are more transparent.

The administration part of the product could be increased. There are, for instance, lots of statistics available for the platform, but you really have to harvest them, as they are available on so many different parts of the product.

It lacks centralized product administration; you have to access different parts of the product. For some administration tasks, you need to be in the web interface of the product; for other administration tasks, you have to be on the command line of the operating system where the product is running, and so on.

Also, the different tools you have to use for day-to-day operations sometimes makes it hard to keep up with the work that needs to be done to keep the product running on a day-to-day basis.

I have used it since the start of the product (January 2007).

The stability is quite high. We have had some crash issues in the past, but IBM Support did a tremendous job for us at the time to find the issues which caused the platform to crash.

The scalability within the product is one of the big plusses, because the underlying infra where the applications are running on is IBM WebSphere. It is one of the best application platforms, which can scale easily in a horizontal and vertical way.

As indicated elsewhere. We haven’t had much interaction with IBM Support, but the times we had to, they really did a tremendous job finding the issues in our environment.

We have used SharePoint in the past, but this product (IBM Connections) is much more a total solution out of the box than SharePoint can deliver, so we migrated all our content from SharePoint to IBM Connections.

The initial setup was quite easy after we had defined the basic parameters the environment had to fulfill.

Regarding pricing, the product is far from the cheapest in the market, but I would advise to never pay the list price. There is a lot of negotiation room from the IBM side. So use that and defend your own position hard!

We used the Gartner “Enterprise Social Platforms” reports to identify the leaders in this market. We used these “leaders” as a list to compare features that were important to use. And so we decided that IBM Connections would fulfill most of our needed functions. At the time we had to make our decision, these were the products in the leader quadrant:

• Liferay
• Jive
• Salesforce Chatter
• IBM Connections
• Microsoft SharePoint

Be very specific on features your business expects form such a platform as this, and then be honest about which products fulfill them the most. Don’t let your IT department decide to buy the product; the business department in your company should make the decision as they are your end users.

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.