Enterprise AI Search, Intranet, and Wiki in one platform. Guru lives in tools organizations already use, so no need to context switch. Users can find info across any app, have an expert help if the info can't be found, and let Guru proactively identify knowledge gaps, duplicate knowledge, and translate it to 100 languages.
$12
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.
A scenario where it makes sense is a platform to organize your company content and knowledge base. It has the right access level and permissions. A scenario where it doesn't make sense is that it's limited in its navigation. So it's not really a one-stop shop; it needs a presentation layer or improvements in that area.
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.
Guru cards and articles are very organized and easy to access, especially in an everyday setting.
Guru is also good at integrating across applications. For example, with Google Chrome, the Guru extension helps me locate and pull up articles quickly.
Guru is also constantly updated to provide accurate solutions to every complex problem. Guru is always moving forward.
Guru also makes us retain this information by consistently reminding us about changes and updates through notifications.
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 Firefox and Outlook compatible plugins is one of my main concern.
I would like to see compatibility across various systems. Having a background in web development, the lack of cross-compatibility is upsetting to see and experience, especially in this current age of tech - 20 years ago, it was a different story.
Lack of organization Very opinionated (you have to think like Guru's team to really utilize their product) Difficult to maintain as the amount of content in your Guru expands Awful searching
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.
With Guru, information flows seamlessly through your organization, cutting through meeting and chat fatigue and giving your team time back to stop looking for information and do what you hired them to do. Guru does the heavy lifting to get you set up quickly, ensuring information is readily accessible when and where it’s needed, all while improving in quality over time
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.
Its search functionality, its tagging capability as well authentication, security and compliancy are 2nd to none! Where I feel Guru falls a tiny bit short is not everything about it is super intuitive such as building out cards. But it is very reliable and consistent, you can be confident if you set up your cards or groups correctly it will do the job.
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.
The only reason I do not give it a a ten is because I think there is still some room for improvement in meeting the different time zone needs of their customers, but overall their support is top notch. Friendly, capable, and quick.
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.
I would rate the in-person training for Guru a solid 9 out of 10. The session was incredibly valuable as it provided comprehensive insights into using Guru effectively. I learned a lot about the tool's functionalities, which significantly enhanced my proficiency and confidence in utilizing Guru for my daily tasks. The training was engaging, informative, and tailored well to ensure I could apply what I learned immediately. Overall, it was a highly productive and beneficial learning experience.
I would rate the online training for Guru a strong 8 out of 10. While it lacked the interactive nature of in-person sessions, the content was well-structured and delivered effectively. The training modules were clear and comprehensive, covering all essential aspects of using Guru. The flexibility of online training allowed me to learn at my own pace and revisit topics as needed. Overall, it provided a solid foundation and practical understanding of Guru's functionalities, making it a valuable learning experience despite the virtual format.
You will need a very strong team of guru champions in order to get EVERYONE and EVERYTHING on Guru, it takes some craziness and over talking about guru everywhere to get people to be exicted, contribute and use. If you are starting any kind of buisness and you need KB, just go for guru as fast as you can because when you will grow you will thank yourself.
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.
Guru prioritizes the domain I work in, and their algorithm gives me results focused on my domain first. Depending on the search terms being used, then they provide what is most relevant to the term searched. Very often, this is a time-saving exercise. We also have access to how many people are reading each card, and we can offer feedback to the owner/deviser of a card if the knowledge there is outdated or if a few lines of information would add to the overall context. The data we can extract helps us understand potential gaps and where we could do better.
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.
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?
Streamlined Knowledge Sharing: Guru has significantly improved Tripleseat's internal knowledge sharing. With its user-friendly platform, our team can easily create and access critical information, ensuring everyone stays on the same page. This has boosted collaboration and efficiency across different departments.
Enhanced Sales Enablement: Guru's role in building battle cards for our Sales team has been a game-changer. The platform provides quick and easy access to up-to-date, relevant content, helping our sales representatives stay well-informed and confident during customer interactions. This has positively impacted our sales process and customer engagement.
Responsive Support and Guidance: The Guru support team's responsiveness and willingness to assist have been invaluable. Whenever we've had questions or needed guidance, they've promptly scheduled meetings, offering insights and suggestions that have proven instrumental in optimizing our use of the platform. This proactive support has contributed to a positive overall experience with Guru at Tripleseat.