ElaBoard vs. HCL Connections

It is visually appealing and any user may fall in love with the interface & overall design of the application. It is light and fast. It is a breeze for the organizations with remote team so that they can colloborate and discuss different things on the same page. Drag and drop features add value and easy of use. Creating and discussing the points is easy with Colored Markets and drawings. It helps to make the boring meetings, more productive, effective and fun.

Incentivized

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

• I like that we can collaborate all in one place without the need for multiple different windows or applications of different products to view necessary documentation across teams.
• I love how easy to use it is and it took hardly any work at all to set up.
• The use of templates really helps speed things up, so we're not left trying to assemble things all on our own.

Incentivized

• 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

• They need more templates! There are only a few options and they aren't very creative or helpful. Need more variety.
• Wish you could import and integrate with Miro boards.
• Sometimes the drag and drop has glitches when using it.

Incentivized

• 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

We give ElaBoard a 10 out of 10 rating because it has proven to be an invaluable tool for our organization. ElaBoard has allowed us to easily set and track our goals, collaborate with cross-functional teams, manage our budget, forecast our expenses, develop successful products, and track progress on various projects. Additionally, ElaBoard has enabled us to quickly and easily visualize complex data sets, create custom workflows, and create presentation-style slideshows. These features, along with ElaBoard's intuitive user interface and responsive customer support team, make it an ideal choice for our organization and make us confident that it will continue to provide the features and functionality we need in the future.

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

I gave ElaBoard an 8 rating for its overall usability because it provides an intuitive and user-friendly platform for teams to collaborate on a variety of tasks. The kindergarten management system was a great addition, as it allowed us to keep track of the kids inside the home or in the kindergarten. Additionally, the library of educational resources and games was also very useful. Furthermore, the platform is easy to set up and navigate, and the customer service team is responsive and helpful. Overall, ElaBoard makes it easy for teams to work together and efficiently get things done.

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

I gave ElaBoard a rating of 9 out of 10 for availability because it is designed to be extremely reliable, and it is backed by a team of experienced engineers and administrators who are dedicated to ensuring the product is available whenever it is needed. Additionally, ElaBoard has multiple layers of redundancy and failover built into the system to ensure that there are no single points of failure and that the system remains available even in the event of an unexpected outage. Furthermore, ElaBoard's servers are regularly monitored and maintained to ensure that the system is running optimally.

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

I gave ElaBoard a rating of 9 out of 10 for performance because it is designed to be extremely fast, and it is optimized for both speed and efficiency. Pages on the platform load quickly, and reports tend to complete in a reasonable amount of time, given their complexity. Additionally, ElaBoard is designed to be light on resources, so it doesn't slow down other software or systems it might be integrated with. Furthermore, ElaBoard's servers are regularly monitored and maintained to ensure that the system is running optimally.

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

I give ElaBoard an 8 out of 10 rating because of the helpfulness and responsiveness of their customer service team. They have a knowledge base with detailed instructions and guides, as well as a dedicated customer service team that is available to answer questions. In my experience, the support team has been friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful in resolving my issues quickly and efficiently. Additionally, I found that the product itself was easy to use and had a wide range of features that met my needs.

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

Key insights regarding the implementation of ElaBoard include the importance of planning, gathering stakeholder buy-in, ensuring compatibility with existing systems, providing sufficient training and support, and monitoring the implementation process to ensure it achieves the desired outcomes. Additionally, it is important to consider the potential impact of the change on those affected by it and to ensure that data is migrated correctly. Lastly, it is important to ensure that the implementation process is completed on time and within budget.

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.

Trello and ElaBoard share the feature of allowing users to organize and collaborate on projects, tasks, and events. Both allow users to create boards to store and organize information, as well as add notes, files, tags, and comments for each item. It offers us a series of advanced features, such as version control, change tracking and integration with other applications. The main difference between Trello and ElaBoard is that Trello focuses on collaboration while ElaBoard focuses primarily on project management and organization.

Incentivized

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

I gave ElaBoard a rating of 9 out of 10 for scalability because it is designed to be flexible and easily configurable, allowing organizations to quickly and easily adjust the system to their needs. Additionally, the product can be easily deployed in a variety of environments and scales to meet the needs of the organization. Furthermore, ElaBoard provides a wide range of features and tools that make it easy to integrate and manage data from multiple sources, as well as to create custom visualizations and reports. All of these features make ElaBoard an excellent choice for organizations looking for a highly scalable solution.

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: Increased productivity for sprint planning
• Positive: It helps to give you a high-level overview of projects and initiatives as you can have a very good view of everything documented on ElaBoard

• 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