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.
N/A
Intranet Connections
Score 7.6 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Intranet Connections (formerly IC Thrive) is built for internal communicators, HR professionals, and marketers in finance, healthcare, and corporate industries. The software keeps all files, internal communications, and sensitive information secure and readily accessible in a single source of truth, with Source Intranet Software. The solution helps users to…
$4
per user per month for 500 employees
Pricing
HCL Connections
Intranet Connections
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Cloud intranet software
$4
per user per month for 500 employees
On premise intranet software
$70
Per user, 1 time set up fee for 500 users
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HCL Connections
Intranet Connections
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
—
No third party consultants are required. Our stellar customer experience department works with all levels of expertise and provides custom services depending on level of need within your organization.
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.
Intranet Connections is well-suited for organizations looking for one platform to fulfill a variety of needs, from sharing communication and documentation to create "sections" for various department units. If you're looking specifically to create a searchable knowledgebase, Intranet Connections can do that, but other platforms are potentially more appropriate if that is the only need you're trying to fill.
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.
There isn't availablity to help with charity drives. We aren't able to track or even graph information as it becomes available.
We also have repo vehicles and are not able to have employees bid on these items anonymously. Even though we have the Buy/Sell asset it doesn't allow for any items to be sold this way.
It would also be nice if we were able to interface with our current internet site. For example, it would be nice to post our Community Outreach Calendar for all of our regions to our webpage, so we don't have to double create work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We currently have not evaluated any other intranet services, but we will be looking at the system functionality it doesn't offer vs another provided that does.
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?
