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HCL Connections

Score9 out of 10

52 Reviews and Ratings

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What is HCL Connections?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about HCL Connections.
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A multifunctional tool

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

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.

Most Important Features

  • Sharing and collaboration
  • Workplace social networking hub

Return on Investment

  • Positive Impact - Better collaboration & sharing across the comapny
  • There are no negative impacts

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

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

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.

Return on Investment

  • The ROI with Connections is realized once you have completed your first project. Time saved and improved customer satisfaction.
  • I would like to see better integration with Microsoft email and Google docs.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

ContactWorld for Salesforce

Other Software Used

Salesforce App Cloud

A complete package but expensive and complicated to maintain

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

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

Return on Investment

  • Tangible ROI is hard to measure. It helps to connect people in your organization. Better relationships and better information mean that your organization can be more efficient and more connected to each other. It may help improve morale which can have an impact on the bottom line.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Yammer and Slack

Other Software Used

Microsoft Yammer, Slack, OneDrive

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

Incentivized
Tony Morales, PMP, CSMView profile
Project Management Office (PMO) Manager in Information Technology at Carestream (5001-10,000 employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Planview Projectplace

Other Software Used

Docuware Cloud

IBM Connections - Not Connecting Ideas!

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

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.

Return on Investment

  • Connections had a substanially negative ROI for our company because we eventually replaced it with far better tools.
  • We're also unfortunately stuck with maintenance costs as we've not migrated all of the user generated content over to the new tools.
  • Other parts of our company still use Connections, so I guess that's a good thing? They must find it usable enough to continue on with it.

Alternatives Considered

Atlassian Confluence

Other Software Used

Atlassian Confluence, JIRA Software, Bitbucket, SuccessFactors Perform and Reward, Planview Enterprise One (formerly Planview Enterprise and Troux), lynda.com, Pluralsight