Bolste vs. HCL Connections

Bolste is best suited for companies that rely on team work and e-mail communication within/between departments

IBM Connections is possibly most suited for larger organizations where bigger teams are able to have more people to share with. Also, it may be less appropriate when there is so much security that it would hinder the anytime, anywhere access capabilities and prevent users from being able to enjoy sharing content with each other.

Incentivized

• Keeps everybody on the same page.
• Easy to access/use.

• Connections has an easy to understand layout so if you are new to the tool you can catch on quickly.
• The security features are excellent, I feel comfortable that we will not get hacked.
• Connections provide a single place to store project docs, pics, emails and to collaborate real-time with your team.

Incentivized

• There is only 7GB of storage in the Plus Pack.

• Search in connections is incredibly poor. It's commonly joked that once data goes into Connections, you never find it again, unless you have a direct link. This alone kills usability for Connections.
• Embedded content in wiki pages in connections is poorly implemented. While the content displays, you can't interact with it, or edit it reasonably, and it's really slow to load.
• The "social" features in Connections are pretty lame, and no self-respecting user spends any time trying to build their profile. It's just disappointing.

Incentivized

Connections has continued to more than meet our needs from a collaboration point of view and we are currently working on integration with our IBM Websphere portal platform to provide an integrated collaboration solution. This scenario will provide our users the best both products have to offer in a single interface.

Incentivized

Connections combines all the most useful abilities from various social networks. This makes it useful of course, but it also reduces user adoption time initially by allowing users to get comfortable with basic features. Once they are comfortable, it's easy for users to start exploring. They find new people in the organization to contact, new sources of information, etc. Before you know it, about half of the users are contributing back in some form -- and all with little or no training needed by IT.

Incentivized

Once Connections was installed, patched, etc. it was ALWAYS up. We only had to bring it down for OS updates to the servers. That seems to be typical of anything that runs on WebSphere; it's bulletproof and could probably run for months and years if the underlying OS didn't require constant patching.

Incentivized

IBM Connections web UI, mobile app (data sync to / from the device), and file transfer speeds were almost always very fast. It was rare for a slow-down of any kind, even when doing searches.

Incentivized

IBM Support has ALWAYS been quick to respond, regardless of the product. Even first level techs seldom provide "canned" responses and they really try to help. If they can't help, they don't wallow around but engage the right person immediately. It's very rare that the first level tech needs to escalate, and even more rare when they do escalate and the next person engaged cannot solve it. We have been more than satisfied with IBM support's quick and professional responses to our issues.

Incentivized

Try to understand you will never find a product which suites all your end user for 100%. IBM Connections is the best of all breeds but if you go look on each functionality on its own there are better example out there. But as IBM COnnections delivers it all in just one platform makes it the best example about integration of different functionality into one platform.

IBM Connections offers a complete package of tools that can be useful but it doesn't integrate well with other services. Competitors like Yammer offer slightly fewer features but are cheaper and much easier to maintain. If we were making a decision today we probably would choose a combination of Yammer, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other Microsoft or Google Tools.

Incentivized

Scaling UP is never an issue with IBM's core technologies like WebSphere, DB2, etc. as long as you have or can find the technical resources to implement it. Where IBM seems to fail is scaling DOWN for smaller organizations. Connections 5.0 on-premises would have required us to create 7 servers -- yes, they would be virtualized, but still that's 7 OS licenses, 40 virtual CPU cores, 80GB RAM, and a few TB of hard disk space. All to replace Quick which runs on 1 server with 1 OS license, 4 cores, 8GB RAM and 600GB of disk. Granted, there are major differences in capabilities between the two, but how do you get a CFO understand why features like a mobile app, file sync, and social sharing require 10x the back-end resources?

Incentivized

• Positive - Using IBM Connections has reduced the number of directories and file share repositories previously used for collaboration.
• Positive - The direction is to stop relying on email for the only method of communicating and sharing knowledge. IBM Connections is in the right step.

Incentivized