Based in New York City, ElaBoard is an online whiteboard platform for distributed team collaboration. The platform's limitless working canvas facilitates its more than 5M users to lead engaging workshops and meetings, innovate products, and brainstorm conceptions. It is excellent for cross-functional teams at organizations of all sizes, regardless of industry.
$7
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.
N/A
Pricing
ElaBoard
HCL Connections
Editions & Modules
Starter
$7
per month per user
Professional
$14
per month per user
Business
$25
per month per user
Enterprise
$40
per month per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ElaBoard
HCL Connections
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
A 14 day free trial is available so you can try Elaboard before you buy. Elaboard has 4 pricing editions, ranging from $7 to $40 per user per month.
ElaBoard is particularly well-suited for creating engaging visuals for presentations, bulletin boards, and classroom door decorations. It is also great for managing projects and providing resources to help users collaborate more easily. Additionally, ElaBoard is great for quickly creating and sharing documents and materials with other users.When it comes to more complex tasks, such as creating animations and transitions, ElaBoard may not be the best option. Additionally, ElaBoard does not offer many customization options, making it difficult to create unique visuals that capture the user's desired look and feel. Finally, ElaBoard's search and filtering tools could be improved, as it can be difficult to quickly find the materials needed for a project.
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.
It provides a number of tools, such as a calendar, task lists, frameworks, tracking charts, shares, real-time notifications, and more.
It allows us to create projects, share files, have real-time conversations and keep up with the activity of other team members.
Analysis tools include interactive charts, pivot tables, performance and resource usage reports, and more. These tools allow users to gain a deep understanding of the results of their projects.
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
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.
We give ElaBoard a 10 out of 10 rating because it has proven to be an invaluable tool for our organization. ElaBoard has allowed us to easily set and track our goals, collaborate with cross-functional teams, manage our budget, forecast our expenses, develop successful products, and track progress on various projects. Additionally, ElaBoard has enabled us to quickly and easily visualize complex data sets, create custom workflows, and create presentation-style slideshows. These features, along with ElaBoard's intuitive user interface and responsive customer support team, make it an ideal choice for our organization and make us confident that it will continue to provide the features and functionality we need in the future.
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 gave ElaBoard an 8 rating for its overall usability because it provides an intuitive and user-friendly platform for teams to collaborate on a variety of tasks. The kindergarten management system was a great addition, as it allowed us to keep track of the kids inside the home or in the kindergarten. Additionally, the library of educational resources and games was also very useful. Furthermore, the platform is easy to set up and navigate, and the customer service team is responsive and helpful. Overall, ElaBoard makes it easy for teams to work together and efficiently get things done.
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 gave ElaBoard a rating of 9 out of 10 for availability because it is designed to be extremely reliable, and it is backed by a team of experienced engineers and administrators who are dedicated to ensuring the product is available whenever it is needed. Additionally, ElaBoard has multiple layers of redundancy and failover built into the system to ensure that there are no single points of failure and that the system remains available even in the event of an unexpected outage. Furthermore, ElaBoard's servers are regularly monitored and maintained to ensure that the system is running optimally.
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.
I gave ElaBoard a rating of 9 out of 10 for performance because it is designed to be extremely fast, and it is optimized for both speed and efficiency. Pages on the platform load quickly, and reports tend to complete in a reasonable amount of time, given their complexity. Additionally, ElaBoard is designed to be light on resources, so it doesn't slow down other software or systems it might be integrated with. Furthermore, ElaBoard's servers are regularly monitored and maintained to ensure that the system is running optimally.
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.
I give ElaBoard an 8 out of 10 rating because of the helpfulness and responsiveness of their customer service team. They have a knowledge base with detailed instructions and guides, as well as a dedicated customer service team that is available to answer questions. In my experience, the support team has been friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful in resolving my issues quickly and efficiently. Additionally, I found that the product itself was easy to use and had a wide range of features that met my needs.
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.
Key insights regarding the implementation of ElaBoard include the importance of planning, gathering stakeholder buy-in, ensuring compatibility with existing systems, providing sufficient training and support, and monitoring the implementation process to ensure it achieves the desired outcomes. Additionally, it is important to consider the potential impact of the change on those affected by it and to ensure that data is migrated correctly. Lastly, it is important to ensure that the implementation process is completed on time and within budget.
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.
Interface of Ela Board is better and user-friendly. It is dependent on the G Suite and may not be considered as an independent Whiteboard. Very limited tools available. Media tools are not available. Being a google product, the we were not confident on the security front. Limited and not so good templates are available. However, you can change the background colors & images but it do not give a feel of full functional and professional solution
From the few times that I have used MS SharePoint, I can say that it doesn't seem to hold a candle to the robust features of IBM Connections. The out-of-the-box capabilities of IBM Connections are amazing and are more easy to access and use than what I've seen with MS SharePoint.
I gave ElaBoard a rating of 9 out of 10 for scalability because it is designed to be flexible and easily configurable, allowing organizations to quickly and easily adjust the system to their needs. Additionally, the product can be easily deployed in a variety of environments and scales to meet the needs of the organization. Furthermore, ElaBoard provides a wide range of features and tools that make it easy to integrate and manage data from multiple sources, as well as to create custom visualizations and reports. All of these features make ElaBoard an excellent choice for organizations looking for a highly scalable solution.
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?
