HCL Connections vs. HipChat (discontinued)

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

HipChat was discontinued by Atlassian because it wasn't as versatile as Slack and couldn't handle Video/Audio calls as well as Zoom. It lacked the screen sharing capabilities of Skype and ScreenHero (now owned by Slack). It wasn't great at any particular area and its competitors were obviously better in those areas. This lack of versatility negatively impacted it's adoption at GLG, and I'd imagine the rest of world as well. HipChat excels at instant messaging communication (which is the one thing they got right) and although you could make specific rooms to chat about certain topics, Slack was already doing this way better. Overall it's impossible to recommend this software today. If I recall it was very expensive compared to better and more feature rich competitors. If you're seeking a bare bones method of communication you may consider the free version of it, but outside of that scenario, you are almost certainly better off going with a different product.

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

• HipChat is very stable and reliable. I have never had issues with not being able to connect or being able to communicate with others on HipChat.
• HipChat integrates quite well with other applications, such as Jira and Stash. This is a main selling point for my team. It provides a convenient feed of actions on a JIRA story or Stash pull request.
• HipCat does a good job of allowing 1-1 and group chats. It is simple to start a new conversation and it is easy to hold a group conversation and keep track of who is in the room.
• I like how HipChat has away/here/on mobile statuses. This makes it easy to see if a person is available to be contacted.

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

• Mobile app is not very responsive on iOS. Sometimes connection to Hipchat servers is taking too long even on good networks.
• Both mobile and desktop versions have no alphabetical or recent sorting for groups and chat rooms.
• Video and audio calls are pretty useless, they're slow and not always work.
• The whole user interface is simple but very outdated - apparently Atlassian didn't focus too much on Hipchat even though they tried in the last 2 years.

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

If they fix the bugs the last update gave that are causing hipchat to crash more often.

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 like how its easy to login , create rooms or start private conversations . The best feature i like describing usability is searching history of conversation in either a room or private conversation just by typing single word .Easy file uploading and downloading .Mention feature is very easy to use which shows all the names starting with given letter .

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

HipChat support was one of the best I've encountered. When we faced difficult tasks in terms of updates to infrastructure (where HipChat sits on top) or updates to the application itself, HipChat support was very responsive to our questions, concerns, and comments. HipChat also had some really good online documentation. We were able to find step-by-step guidelines and documentation when implementing new features or installing new updates/patches.

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.

I don't have insights as I was not a part of the implementation. However, I love the end product

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've used Slack and it's much better app in comparison with HipChat. Slack is much faster than HipChat. Slack has strong user community and lot of documentation around how to use it. Product functionality and performance is superb with Slack compared to HipChat. Slack has more emojis and icons which brings them closer to how people use their cell phones in text conversations.

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

Actually I never shared of HipChat using with more than 25 persons in team simultaneously, but I believe it can be scaled for much largest collaboration teams. At least it works flawlessly for us, with transparent integration with Jira, and I am not see any reasons for some troubles for work at big scale.

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

• HipChat has increased the effiency with which I am able to communicate with my coworkers, particularly those who work out of other offices. Having a light, portable messaging solution has been beneficial for checking in on small things without the need to send emails or schedule phone calls.

Incentivized