Enterprise AI Search, Intranet, and Wiki in one platform. Guru lives in tools organizations already use, so no need to context switch. Users can find info across any app, have an expert help if the info can't be found, and let Guru proactively identify knowledge gaps, duplicate knowledge, and translate it to 100 languages.
$18
per month per user
HCL Connections
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Connections from HCL Technologies (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in 2018) is a collaboration tool and employee digital workspace with key features like social analytics, blogs, document management, and a social network.
Anything related to knowledge Management, that is to say; Updating knowledge from the side of maintainers, grouping and learning it from the side of learners, leaving feedback to maintainers, unverifying cards in a pinch and creating courses of related content for people of different disciplines and favouriting content that you find the most useful.
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.
It's not clear how to relate/ attach other guru cards. The feature exists but is not very easy to spot.
We often find it difficult to search because we don't remember the card's title. I would love it if the tag words worked better.
Once editing a card, instead of adding someone to collaborate on a draft, it would be good to send the draft to someone via email. I find people often ignore these emails/pings if it's just a draft collaboration. The wording could be to ask someone to verify the draft.
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.
With Guru, information flows seamlessly through your organization, cutting through meeting and chat fatigue and giving your team time back to stop looking for information and do what you hired them to do. Guru does the heavy lifting to get you set up quickly, ensuring information is readily accessible when and where it’s needed, all while improving in quality over time
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.
I give this rating because I really find Guru useful and user-friendly. You can easily follow and understand the steps and information from Guru. It has suited every issue that I have handled, and I was able to resolve it with the help of Guru. I hope that more people will find it helpful.
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.
I have never encountered an outage with Guru in the year+ we've had it. I also never encountered an outage at the previous company where I used Guru. It has been extremely reliable.
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.
There is some occasional slowness, or multiple refreshes before content will load. This doesn't happen frequently, though, and I don't get complaints from teammates about it.
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.
The only reason I do not give it a a ten is because I think there is still some room for improvement in meeting the different time zone needs of their customers, but overall their support is top notch. Friendly, capable, and quick.
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.
I would rate the in-person training for Guru a solid 9 out of 10. The session was incredibly valuable as it provided comprehensive insights into using Guru effectively. I learned a lot about the tool's functionalities, which significantly enhanced my proficiency and confidence in utilizing Guru for my daily tasks. The training was engaging, informative, and tailored well to ensure I could apply what I learned immediately. Overall, it was a highly productive and beneficial learning experience.
I would rate the online training for Guru a strong 8 out of 10. While it lacked the interactive nature of in-person sessions, the content was well-structured and delivered effectively. The training modules were clear and comprehensive, covering all essential aspects of using Guru. The flexibility of online training allowed me to learn at my own pace and revisit topics as needed. Overall, it provided a solid foundation and practical understanding of Guru's functionalities, making it a valuable learning experience despite the virtual format.
You will need a very strong team of guru champions in order to get EVERYONE and EVERYTHING on Guru, it takes some craziness and over talking about guru everywhere to get people to be exicted, contribute and use. If you are starting any kind of buisness and you need KB, just go for guru as fast as you can because when you will grow you will thank yourself.
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.
The platform is unique, comprehensive, and uses AI. These are standout features. I also like the verification process and the ability to search from anywhere or on any browser. Guru enhances productivity and knowledge transfer when someone leaves an organization. Guru's interface is very user-friendly and can be trained quickly with new hires.
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.
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?
Guru allows our team to quickly reference available learning/knowledge materials with our clients on a daily basis and provide better support at every outreach
With that said, spreading those same resources across two major global teams in the USA and Germany can lead to some inconsistencies. The i-frame process is not very intuitive for this scenario and our team treats policy/procedural differences as separate card or article entities.
Guru allowed our organization to pioneer and establish a dedicated knowledge team component, of subject matter experts who work in tangent with existing resources, create new ones, and vet collective knowledge.
