HCL Connections

Score9 out of 10

52 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for HCL Connections are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

IBM Connections is a versatile platform used organization-wide to connect users, find and organize information, and collaborate on projects. Users across departments benefit from the collaboration tools offered by IBM Connections for internal projects and team collaboration. Additionally, frontline production workers to board members rely on this software for project management, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and idea sharing.

IBM Connections addresses various business problems such as document editing, sharing, version control, as well as enabling increased transparency. It serves as a centralized repository for constantly changing information with multiple levels of permissions, tagging, and spaces. This makes it an ideal replacement for wikis, providing structure in organizing and updating information effectively.

Organizations in the insurance industry utilize IBM Connections to write wiki places and blogs in different languages. Mizuno utilizes IBM Connections organization-wide to keep everyone informed and connected, share data, and stay updated on company-wide events. The software is also being evaluated for cloud options to provide document control, integration of social tools, and compatibility with various devices.

Users find value in IBM Connections' communication features to connect with staff and disseminate information within communities created for individual departments. The software's usage statistics and reporting capabilities are crucial for users to track the effectiveness of their content. Additionally, the HR department benefits from the MS Office plugin for sharing and editing documents.

Overall, IBM Connections has proven to be an invaluable tool in improving communication among teams, facilitating collaboration between departments spread across large geographical areas, and providing a centralized platform for everyday operations.

Reviews

20 Reviews

A multifunctional tool

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 25, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Connections is a corporate collaboration software that enables teams to operate more efficiently. It improves communication among project teams. It provides all employees with a single platform to access and manage all of their everyday operations. Collaboration between teams for exchanging the data. It is a technology that has enabled the business to update and react to market trends, becoming more efficient in process compliance.

Pros

Excellent for collaboration and communication
User friendly UI
Easy to learn & understand
File Version controlling

Cons

When exporting huge volumes of data, it might be a little sluggish at times.
It takes time and effort to install and configure.
It's a really large product that new users may find frightening. Pricing, I believe, restricts the number of business units that can choose to compete.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is an amazing tool when you need to lighten and enhance the working environment, and it has meant for us a better integration of personnel in their various areas, with no vertical relationships and simply support and cooperation accomplished in this space.

Anurag Chaudhary

Engineer (Design & Development) in Engineering at JTEKT India Technical Center (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

Connections is a proven tool for managing complicated projects and keeping your data secure

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 20, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Connections as a repository and means of communication for internal projects. It is being used by all departments and is a good tool for team collaboration.

Pros

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.

Cons

I would like to see better integration with Microsoft email.

Likelihood to Recommend

I highly recommend Connections because it has all the features you would need to create a project and keep all documents in one spot and communicate with your team securely.

Kelly Capo

Business Development in Sales at IBM (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

IBM Connections in the Cloud - One Stop for Communication and Collaboration

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 13, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Connections is being used across the entire organization and is available to us on our internet browser via the cloud. IBM Connections is our tool to connect to each other and collaborate in a number of areas - project management, knowledge management, collaboration and sharing of ideas. Our company also is able to use email, calendars and virtual meeting rooms for communication.

Pros

The virtual meeting room tool is reliable and easy to use.
Email capability via the browser and not a client installed application.
Calendars and meeting scheduling in IBM Connections. This is a one stop shop!
Communities for sharing documents and knowledge has been one of the better features our company is adopting. Let's get out of file shares and Windows folders.
Our company does not have the chat feature which would be helpful.

Cons

The screens are not overly intuitive and require some tutorials or just plain discovery learning and trial and error.
Browser-based so not sure all browsers are supported.

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Connections is a great one-stop shop for email, calendars, meeting rooms, and sharing documents and knowledge. I believe the academic setting would highly benefit from IBM Connections. The meeting room tool is great as it provides a pre-formatted meeting notes document that includes all participants who joined and detailed information like time and date of meeting. The template can then be tailored to suit the meeting room organizers' needs.

Tony Morales, PMP, CSM

Project Management Office (PMO) Manager in Information Technology at Carestream (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

A complete package but expensive and complicated to maintain

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

June 20, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Connections is used by the entire organization. We have many departments and user groups that are divided into Connections "communities". It helps connects users across the organization to each other and to help find and organize information. It is especially useful for connecting with people who you don't normally work with on a day to day basis.

Pros

User profiles - finding and connecting users, and showing where they fit in the organization
Communities - providing places for user groups and departments to collect and share information
Wikis - Makes it easy to edit and add information in various places

Cons

Surveys and forms - lacking many features including basic ones like e-mail notification
Search - often doesn't find things users are looking for
Installation and maintenance - complex software is hard to install and maintain

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Connections is well suited for larger organizations that need an internal social networking tool and are willing to deal with IBM and the complexity of the software. It is less appropriate for smaller organizations and those who don't want to deal with the complexity, or IBM's awful customer service and prices.

Jeremiah Miller

Associate Director IT Infrastructure in Information Technology at Mennonite Central Committee (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

IBM Connections - Not Connecting Ideas!

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

May 11, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Connections is being used largely as a wiki replacement system because of its tight integration with other IBM products. For instance, we used (and have since replaced) IBM Jazz. At the time that we implemented Jazz, we needed a centralized repository for constantly changing information, something that Wikis are good at. Connections was selected to be that Wiki-like tool, with multiple levels of permissions, tagging, and spaces. We also used it as a blogging platform. Users would post blogs to Jazz either from their personal spaces or from other relevant business spaces.

Pros

Connections does tagging really well. It's very easy to add tags to any given page and to sort content based on those tags. This makes it easy to find related pages.
Connections is capable - note that I said capable, and not "does a good job at" of embedding multiple kinds of content and making it viewable. Viewing Office documents is possible within Connections.
Connections also does permissions really well, locking down spaces depending on certain groups of users. You can view this as a positive or a negative, depending on your use case.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are absoloutely locked into the IBM Software ecosystem (required to use Lotus Notes, Jazz, etc,) Connections is better than nothing. However, I'd still rather use a roll your own solution, or, even better, the Atlassian suite of tools, which does a much better job than Connections ever did for us.

Let me be clear: you should really only opt to use Connections if you have no other choice. It will get you by, but it won't make you efficient.

Eric Hodge

Engineering Manager in Research & Development at Waters Corporation (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

IBM Connections is useful

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

December 15, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Connections is used as a source of interdepartmental communication within our office. We also use it for blogging/sharing information about work events and community events. Our email is also connected to IBM Connections.

Pros

Organizes your calendar events.
Has a familiar interface to social media that is used today, such as Facebook.
Is a good way to connect our remote workers with in office workers. Puts a face to the names.
I like that it has the option to comment on blogs or like them.

Cons

I can't really think of any.

Likelihood to Recommend

It depends on company preference. As far as our company, it is not appropriate to share personal matters here.

Pansy Williams

Office Administrator in Human Resources at Educational Credential Evaluators, Inc. (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Not flashy, but it gets the job done

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

December 7, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My organization has primarily been utilizing IBM Connections as a means to communicate with staff. We have an All Staff community in which we post pertinent information for all employees and communities for each individual department. We also have communities for work-related projects. In this way, we use Connections to organize our information for easier consumption. We are in the process of migrating our policy wiki to our department communities. In addition to the above, my department (HR) uses the MS Office plugin for sharing and editing documents. All in all, IBM Connections has been very beneficial to the organization as a provides some much-needed structure in terms of where information goes, when it is updated and how it is presented.

Pros

The plugin for MS Office/Explorer has made saving and sharing working documents extremely convenient for me and my close colleagues
The newsfeed feature conveniently aggregates updates from the communities/people you follow. It's nice not to have to jump from community to community to see what's going on in the organization
The various apps can be used for several purposes. A little creativity goes a long way when establishing what type of information the apps can be useful for communicating

Cons

Navigating Connections is tedious and time-consuming. More times than not I find it easier to simply search for what I'm looking for rather than trying to find what I need through other means
While file uploading and sharing files is useful enough, the browser lacks the seamless nature of Google Docs and the plugin can't hold a candle to Sharepoint. It works, but I find it clunky
We sorely miss our one-stop homepage (The Hub) that has been replaced by IBM Connections. There is no "jump-off" page to provide ease of navigation. It would really nice to be able to provide bookmarks and/or some form of directory in the side tabs of the newsfeed.

Likelihood to Recommend

Ex) We recently gathered a committee to discuss the redesign of a product. All members in the committee were added to a community focused on the redesign. We recorded meeting agendas and minutes in the activities app, uploaded test redesigns for comment in files, and brainstormed potential improvements in the forum

Ex) The status feature is essentially useless without following the person posting the status. We do not follow individual staff members because it leads to a cluttered newsfeed with information irrelevant to other departments. We still use our phone chat client to communicate statuses.

Verified User

Administrative Assistant in Human Resources (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Connect with IBM Connections!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

December 5, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently it is being used across the organization from frontline production workers to board members.
The business problems that it addresses are the following:

Document editing/sharing/versions - instead of multiple emails and versions, there is now only one.
All staff news is shared via a community blog
Use of VPN has decreased - easy access to information and documents anywhere, increased safety for our intellectual property and confidential documents
Individual departments house their manuals/resources in their own community
Individual departments and committees house documents and meeting notes - one location
Transparency is increasing since you can view open/moderated communities
One sign-in - previously we had multiple sign-ins for different things, now you can access email, department manuals, company resources and in-house built systems

Pros

The Newsfeed allows you to personalize and filter the information that you most need. Puts an end to extra emails or being bombarded with irrelevant information.
The Activities and To-Do lists allow you to organize and easily manage meeting notes, agendas, and tasks.
The desktop plug-in for documents allows you to work within Microsoft Word/Excel/PPT but then saves it to the Cloud allowing others to view it regardless of if they have Word, etc... on their computer.
Document versioning allows you to keep/have access to all versions instead of having multiple copies of different versions floating around.

Cons

The actual document editing is a little clunky - it's hard to format within it - that's where the desk-top plug-in comes in handy.
It would be nice to be able to edit/customize your own Homepage and/or customize it based on the company's needs - i.e. relevant links/documents could be accessed there instead of a separate community.
Easier navigation - seeing more of the breadcrumbs of where you are/have been.
It'd be nice to be able to make/nest more subcommunities. Currently there can only be the parent community and a sub/child community. Same thing with the Wikis.
While it is nice to see what information was last updated, it be nice to be able to see the community's wiki pages in the order/manner that they make most sense.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for committee work and also companies that have many departments but also need to create transparency. My company is small and I think it is well-suited for the 90+ employees we have.

At the moment I can't think of any scenarios where it is less appropriate.

Sarah Pressman

Training and Staff Development Specialist in Human Resources at Educational Credential Evaluators (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Great all-around tool for the large but also small environments

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 21, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ToalSystems is an IT consulting company that specializes in collaboration technology by IBM. We design and implement small to very large IBM Connecitons environments for clients and in many cases also support those systems for clients. We also offer training for both end users and technical staff on the every day use of IBM Connections for both on premise installations and the cloud.

Pros

Integrates very well with other existing technology to make the use of IBM Connections as seamless as possible for the cleint: Integration with MS Office products and the Windows desktop / File Explorer is key.
The ability to collaborate with all internal staff and also be able to invite outside vendors/clients/partners to access the system and collaborate around data is very important to our clients.
The usage of IBM Connections often has a direct impact on mail volume, many users now have less "chatter" email in their in-box than before. Being one of 20 people copied on a string of emails that they do not necessarily need to be involved in becomes less and less frequent with the use of IBM Connections in the enterprise.

Cons

A slightly more granular rights structure for files might be useful.
A better way to deal with the data of end-users after they leave - a more simple way to re-assign data ownership to others would be beneficial.

Likelihood to Recommend

I find IBM Connections especially useful when bringing together several disparate and possibly geographically separated team members. Also, the ability to bring in outside people (vendors, clients, partners) is very key as it then keeps all the data and the exchange inside the company but visible to all. No more copying 30 people in emails to make sure everybody is somehow in the loop.

Victor Toal

Chief Solutions Architect in Information Technology at ToalSystems (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

View profile

IBM Connections on-premises: Excellent, but SMBs may want to look at the cloud version instead.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

December 9, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We piloted IBM Connections 5.0 (on-premises) for about 8 months but ended up deciding to evaluate cloud options instead. Our user base is about 650 users and we were looking to move up from Lotus Quickr. We knew we needed something that would work natively on iOS as well as on Windows PCs and in browsers, provide us with additional document control (ECM-type features), and of course integration of social tools to provide easier access to people and information. Usage statistics and reporting were also a concern; users wanted to know when their content was useful (or not).

Pros

The web UI is very easy for most users to get around. The mobile app UI is even better, especially for Blogs and Files. It’s clear IBM has done a lot of work around the usability of Connections. Most users immediately felt at home regardless of which social network(s) they’ve used. Technically savvy users quickly discovered how to customize a Community for their own purposes. After the initial introduction, most users could use the Connections web UI and mobile app easily without IT intervention.
Ideation Blogs are a great way to brainstorm and share ideas, then vote on those ideas. The concept is great, and hopefully as time goes on IBM refines it with additional administrative control.
Early test groups loved the mobile app immediately with its super easy file sync capabilities and associated document editing app (even though we did not have IBM Docs).
Profiles were a big hit right away, making it easy to find, tag (recommend), and follow other people that might not otherwise be connected with in the organization.
The ability to Tag, #hashtag and Follow virtually anything in Connections provides users easy ways to connect with people and content.
External collaboration, even though we never specifically tested this, appears to be very clear in Connections, providing customers etc. a secure way to share information with internal teams.
Search functionality is very good.

Cons

The lack of a note-taking tool became a bigger and bigger issue as time went on. Our pilot users felt Connections was a natural place to take and share meeting notes – including photos, drawings, recorded audio, etc. – and were always frustrated that there was no easy, organized way to do that. We tried using a Blog, Wiki, etc. but nothing really resonated as a good solution for this.
The Wiki tool is weak, providing rigid structure but with few options. A Community can only have a single Wiki, for instance. Wikis are weak in the mobile app as well; they’re not even easy to navigate. Users ended up ignoring Wikis completely despite our efforts to get them to convert documents like guidelines, policies, procedures, handbooks, etc. into Wiki form.
The Windows Explorer plug-in was useful but required a lot of manual intervention to setup. For instance, once a user joins a Community in Connections, the Community also has to be manually added to the Explorer plug-in so the user can find, open and edit files with it. We felt this process should be much more automated.
Tagging is only relevant in the web UI and, to a lesser extent, in the mobile app. However, in the Windows Explorer plug-in, Tags are not usable at all making it difficult to find things that were easy to find in the web UI.
IBM Docs was not included in the on-premises deployment; it was an additional license so we did not test it. Documents, mainly Microsoft Office files, are still the single most common way our user community creates, shares, edits and presents information. That proved to be a major gap for our users, and slowed user adoption considerably. We considered testing it, but IBM Docs would only work for about half of our users so we found ourselves wondering if we really wanted to support two document editing platforms. IBM Docs also offers no way to work offline as far as we could tell. This also meant we would need to keep licensing Microsoft Office which is not cheap.
Consulting costs are high because the back-end environment is complex. Installing, administrating and even patching Connections is a fairly complex process. We needed to hire consultants to install our test environment and any major upgrades would’ve required additional consulting fees. Any 3rd party add-ons we looked at were highly technical in nature meaning…you guessed it, more consulting costs.
Administrating IBM Connections requires editing XML files in a specific, secure way that is typically done in a console. I love consoles as much as the next admin, but when you only use a console once every 2 months it means looking up all the documentation and re-educating yourself. A single change could take me 2 hours to implement. 3rd party admin dashboards do exist, at an additional cost, but IBM really should provide a much easier way to manage the environment.
The lack of in-person or online training courses, materials, videos, etc. really discouraged a lot of users. The only decent training we could find (marketing videos aside) was a single video series on Lynda.com which, of course, was an additional cost. In the end that video didn’t really help our users much beyond introductory concepts.
IBM includes reporting, but it’s a massive Cognos system requiring some serious hardware and Cognos expertise. We had neither, and would have ultimately opted for a 3rd party add-on for reporting and statistics.
An often overlooked concern is eDiscovery. Our contracted eDiscovery service extensively works with various ECMs, but had no idea how they would handle Connections data. The cloud version of Connections offers an add-on for eDiscovery, but as far as we could tell IBM offered nothing for on-premises deployments.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you work in a large company with lots of IT resources experienced with IBM tech such as WebSphere, DB2, etc., then I’d change the recommendation to an 8 for IBM Connections on-premises. Users really loved working in IBM Connections despite various gaps they found, and it seems that IBM is very responsive to customer feedback. Many new features in the last few releases were first suggested by customers.

Similarly, if you work in an SMB and are looking at IBM Connections online (or SmartCloud or whatever IBM calls it these days), then I’d probably also say 8 assuming the cloud version is at least as good as the on-premises version. My guess is that the cloud version is probably better, given IBM’s cloud-first strategy, and don’t forget that the cloud version includes IBM Docs.

If, however, you are in an SMB with a budget-constrained IT staff who are mostly familiar with Microsoft and who find it difficult to work with anything non-Microsoft, then IBM Connections on-premises is probably not going to work well in your organization. I’d score it a 4 in that case. Even if it works well for end-users today, as time goes on it seems users discover more gaps with the software. IBM is not quick to put out new versions of their on-premises software, either. The primary reasons I think on-premises is a tough sell in this scenario are the high cost of consulting (which has a side effect of further delaying the introduction of new features), the lack of an office document editor built-in, and the lack of training for both IT and end-users alike.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Loading Reviews List....

IBM Connections on-premises: Excellent, but SMBs may want to look at the cloud version instead.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

December 9, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

The web UI is very easy for most users to get around. The mobile app UI is even better, especially for Blogs and Files. It’s clear IBM has done a lot of work around the usability of Connections. Most users immediately felt at home regardless of which social network(s) they’ve used. Technically savvy users quickly discovered how to customize a Community for their own purposes. After the initial introduction, most users could use the Connections web UI and mobile app easily without IT intervention.
Ideation Blogs are a great way to brainstorm and share ideas, then vote on those ideas. The concept is great, and hopefully as time goes on IBM refines it with additional administrative control.
Early test groups loved the mobile app immediately with its super easy file sync capabilities and associated document editing app (even though we did not have IBM Docs).
Profiles were a big hit right away, making it easy to find, tag (recommend), and follow other people that might not otherwise be connected with in the organization.
The ability to Tag, #hashtag and Follow virtually anything in Connections provides users easy ways to connect with people and content.
External collaboration, even though we never specifically tested this, appears to be very clear in Connections, providing customers etc. a secure way to share information with internal teams.
Search functionality is very good.

Cons

The lack of a note-taking tool became a bigger and bigger issue as time went on. Our pilot users felt Connections was a natural place to take and share meeting notes – including photos, drawings, recorded audio, etc. – and were always frustrated that there was no easy, organized way to do that. We tried using a Blog, Wiki, etc. but nothing really resonated as a good solution for this.
The Wiki tool is weak, providing rigid structure but with few options. A Community can only have a single Wiki, for instance. Wikis are weak in the mobile app as well; they’re not even easy to navigate. Users ended up ignoring Wikis completely despite our efforts to get them to convert documents like guidelines, policies, procedures, handbooks, etc. into Wiki form.
The Windows Explorer plug-in was useful but required a lot of manual intervention to setup. For instance, once a user joins a Community in Connections, the Community also has to be manually added to the Explorer plug-in so the user can find, open and edit files with it. We felt this process should be much more automated.
Tagging is only relevant in the web UI and, to a lesser extent, in the mobile app. However, in the Windows Explorer plug-in, Tags are not usable at all making it difficult to find things that were easy to find in the web UI.
IBM Docs was not included in the on-premises deployment; it was an additional license so we did not test it. Documents, mainly Microsoft Office files, are still the single most common way our user community creates, shares, edits and presents information. That proved to be a major gap for our users, and slowed user adoption considerably. We considered testing it, but IBM Docs would only work for about half of our users so we found ourselves wondering if we really wanted to support two document editing platforms. IBM Docs also offers no way to work offline as far as we could tell. This also meant we would need to keep licensing Microsoft Office which is not cheap.
Consulting costs are high because the back-end environment is complex. Installing, administrating and even patching Connections is a fairly complex process. We needed to hire consultants to install our test environment and any major upgrades would’ve required additional consulting fees. Any 3rd party add-ons we looked at were highly technical in nature meaning…you guessed it, more consulting costs.
Administrating IBM Connections requires editing XML files in a specific, secure way that is typically done in a console. I love consoles as much as the next admin, but when you only use a console once every 2 months it means looking up all the documentation and re-educating yourself. A single change could take me 2 hours to implement. 3rd party admin dashboards do exist, at an additional cost, but IBM really should provide a much easier way to manage the environment.
The lack of in-person or online training courses, materials, videos, etc. really discouraged a lot of users. The only decent training we could find (marketing videos aside) was a single video series on Lynda.com which, of course, was an additional cost. In the end that video didn’t really help our users much beyond introductory concepts.
IBM includes reporting, but it’s a massive Cognos system requiring some serious hardware and Cognos expertise. We had neither, and would have ultimately opted for a 3rd party add-on for reporting and statistics.
An often overlooked concern is eDiscovery. Our contracted eDiscovery service extensively works with various ECMs, but had no idea how they would handle Connections data. The cloud version of Connections offers an add-on for eDiscovery, but as far as we could tell IBM offered nothing for on-premises deployments.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience