How do Sharepoint and Yammer match up to IBM’s connection solution?

Hello,

Looking at my referrers, I noticed that this question pointed out to my comparison between SharePoint & Connections (see previous discussions for the link).

I didn't compare Connections and SharePoint/Yammer yet but just Connections & SharePoint Social. Now that I have a little bit more experience with Connections & IBM Products in general, I'd consider choosing either of those products the following way:

- Do you plan for onpremises or a Cloud-based solution?
- Do you plan for 100% out of the box or should you be able to customize the product?
- Do you plan to use *only* the Social piece of Connections or do you plan to also store your documents in it? If yes, what kind of documents, Office (integration isn't as in SharePoint).?
- Are you already working with SameTime or with Lync?

Clearly, I'd choose Connections if :

- I'm already using Sametime and/or other IBM products since you'd have an SSO for free using the LTPA tokens
- I don't plan to customize the product heavily.
- I don't plan to have a real document management system in it (Files+CCM) or only with PDF and non Office Documents

If I'd need more than what's listed above, I'd go for SharePoint which doesn't only offer Social Capabilities but also other workfloads such as an extensive Search Engine, LOB integration, WCM, Collaboration, Social and three development/deployment models (Full Trust Solutions, Sandboxed, Apps).

My experience now with Connections is that it's a nice product but it's harder to customize than SharePoint. It doesn't offer many APIs and it's rather hard to find valuable technical documentation on the product. It's also way harder to find non-IBM people working on the product.
With SharePoint, you can really have an industrialization & full ALM of your devleopments and it's quite easy to find .NET/SharePoint developers all around without the need to involve Microsoft. In conclusion, for pure Social related stuff, Connections is better than SharePoint and maybe even better than Yammer but don't try to do anything else with the product nor to interoperate with other products, especially if these are not IBM ones or headaches will start :)

There are lots of reviews of Yammer at www.itcentralstation.com/products/yammer

This is good stuff, really helpful. Wish there was more on Yammer.

Regards,
Kaymaureen Shim

Great! I will check out Cisco-webex

Regards,
Kaymaureen Shim

This blog is extensive from a SharePoint MVP who had worked with both products. Hope this helps

www.silver-it.com/node/157

Yeah - I'd agree with reviewer131589 that if the organization currently has IT/organizational capability around MSFT or IBM, that would certainly figure into the picture. And that whether one or the other would be more appropriate would be subject to business and technical requirements. Otherwise, while I'm more familiar with the SharePoint/Yammer side of things, I do know Connections should also be able to do the job. All these major vendor solutions have robust capabilities - it's just a question of how much do you want/need to invest to get what you want up and running, and whether you want to re-use/build on an existing platform (thus leveraging an existing asset) or go for more of a business point solution. In the latter case, this opens you up to options in the cloud that might be more specific to what you're looking for and give you faster time to market. For a comparison of a few social platforms, check out: www.r2integrated.com/digital-lab/thought-leadership/social-community-platform-comparison. While a practitioner/expert on any one of these might differ with some of the assessments, it at least does give you a nice side-by-side comparison of features. Again, in reality, given that they all can generally do almost anything, you have to take a look at each one and see if its focus is close to what you're trying to provide for your end users/customers. If you have to twist the thing on its head too much, you end up just doing more work. Hope this helps.

The objective of any such initiative by governments is to have a wide
applicability of the solution with rich features but more importantly a
solution that provides the flexibility of scale. If those are the stated
objectives then IBM Connections surely scores over Sharepoint+Yammer any
day. The issue with Sharepoint is the ability to have a public facing
infrastructure which has been designed keeping scale in mind. From a
feature richness angle also IBM Connections scores over Sharepoint since
Connections was designed to be a Social Collaboration tool and now has
tightly integrated solutions including the ability to have analytics and
content tools embedded in the solution.

IBM Connections Integrates well with SharePoint.
Post the integration configuration, most of the time, we should be able to get our SharePoint Libraries and Mysite integrated with connections. By having Microsoft Windows Authentication, we would be able to see the teamsitres, contents etf through SharePoint APIs on Conections page.Availability of Uploading docs are also single click away.Its visa versa from SharePoint as well.
Questions regarding MS Yammer or IBM Connections would be subject to business decision however it would also be dependent on wheather we have Connections in the system or Yammer. if its a fresh new set up planning then in long run SharePoint with Yammer negates the need to have IBM connection and have more cost effective solutions.

Best regards,
Kumar

I have experience using Yammer, Sharepoint, IBM -Sametime, Cisco-webex as a social platform. I liked Cisco - webex for various reason - Easy to use, online conferencing, blog, message broadcast, desktop share, meeting scheduler and seamless integration with MS office calendar. I found webex connect to be feature rich and meets most of our Orgs social needs.

Many Thanks
Pratyush