The product has a pretty flat structure for communities; they are in principle a long list. This gets easily overcrowded and lacks structure/guidance. Tagging is strong, but this may deserve a little bit more.

The platform allows to create communities for collaboration. This is a central feature and very good. It also has a low barrier and is easy. In a large organization, the number of communities increases swiftly. This is like a manila folder containing important information. One after the other with a title page. How is this organized? In a large pile? This did not work in libraries and there are concepts to deal with this.

Connections has only the concept of a large pile. There is obviously good search, but that does not solve the issue as the results depend on words and tagging.

Web pages have the idea about meta data to feed the search engines and this is called SEO as a service offering. This does not work, if communities are not forced to tag our use common titles.

I would prefer if the community element would allow (out of the box) a high degree of structure to allow a navigation.

This is similar to the question, if one searches on the internet via Google 'full text search' or an 'editor list' like Yahoo used to have. Connections is the Google way and it needs to have a Yahoo directory-like component.

After all, it is an enterprise tool and enterprises have a structure with the need of structured information.

I understand this is about IBM making money. But I want all the features/capabilities in the base package. For example, one thing I don’t have is the IBM Connections full-documentation solution (FileNet). If I did, I could get rid of our use of SharePoint. Or at least greatly reduce it.

The support is an area where the product can improve. My company faces some support-related issues because whenever we create or generate a ticket, it takes two days for the product's support team to get back to us, and then they just analyze the issue. It takes more than a week just to forward the request, and then the customer support gets back to us, which I found to be really annoying. If you are having an issue on a Monday, the support personnel will contact you next Monday.

I'd like to see them take nested files out. I know they advertise that. I think that's bad.

I think they've implemented most of what I've been asking for.

Actually, they could implement Watson in a way that it would determine what I want to see, content-wise, and remove the need to follow people, and thereby take away that "fire hose" of information. In today's model, connections content is like a fire hose. As you follow and network with people, you see all of their activity. Eventually in a large company/large network, important activity can be lost in that stream of "following". I would like to see Watson implemented in such a way that I no longer have to create a network and select people to follow. Watson could interpret the data available and present to me what is most important and needs to be seen by me.

And their testing, when they release new packs, is not where it should be. Their technical support suffers because of it.

I would recommend the following areas for improvement:

• The UI can always be improved. The UI for Verse is fine but some of the rest of Connections still looks a bit dated.
• Admin functions need to be enhanced so that community managers have more information about which communities are active/inactive. The community metrics released this year have helped but there is more work needed.
• There needs to be inter-operability between users on the IBM Connections North American Cloud and the IBM Connections European Cloud.
• The Activity Stream needs to be enhanced to allow the user to customise what is included.
• "Push on" and "Deliver", the much-heralded cognitive capabilities of Verse, have been talked about by IBM but so far only seen as demoware.

Generally, I believe IBM are addressing all of these issues but progress seems very slow.

The UI and UX portions definitely need to be improved. This is challenging for Generation Y to adapt to. Hopefully, the latest version will do its best.

From the sharing perspective, it is very clunky. It's very hard to share files and very hard to share content. It is not intuitive in the way it is. It doesn't provide the documentation baseline collaboration, so we're actually moving away from Connections. There are newer versions, but in today's world, with the version that almost everybody uses, it's very, very hard to use.

We would like to see more statistics and have full access to files and communities. Especially with the communities; because when a community owner leaves, it's kind of problematic. As an admin, with offline or on-premise solutions, we have a lot of power and we can respond when there's an issue or if there are any access issues. However, with cloud solutions, it's more limited for us.

I would love for the communities to be more row-based, where you could have more of a community, so that you could set up the email alerts to be mandatory for some of the communities and to be standard for the others; those kinds of functionalities.

For our Knowledge Management initiative, it would benefit to have capabilities within the tool to have one single source of information that allows access to the information needed based on the user’s role within the organization. We have seen other KM products that offer this feature.

The editors that are supported by the product each offer features that would be useful, but there isn’t one editor that offers all of the desired features.

The platform is too dispersive and rigid. It should improve in usability and user interface customization by the user (personalized menu, communities to keep close at hand, always available files, and so on).

There are too many applications that might be replaceable with each other. Excessive opportunities of choice make adoption difficult. You find it difficult to choose the best ways to make sharing actions. For example:

• Sharing of a file: From my personal files and then sharing it to specific communities or directly inside a community?
• Communication inside a community: Should I use the status updates of the community or blog or forum?

Having tools that are able to manage slightly different shades of communication purposes is not always an advantage. A common user often feels disoriented and induced to use simpler tools.

Moreover, the status updates section in a community remains completely hidden. By contrast, if we want to read the recent status updates, we can no longer see other applications available only in the general view. We are used to a unique landing page in every collaborative group, in which we can see immediately recent conversations (LinkedIn and Facebook groups are both structured in this way).

These problems can be overcome by governing the initial stage of installation and choosing in advance which applications to release and when.

Various plugins are available for Microsoft Windows desktops and this adds tremendously to the user experience.

Mac users currently only have File Sync support and no plugins are available for Linux desktop users, leaving these users heavily dependent of the web user interface. Although the web user interface works great and is constantly being improved, the plugins create a more seamless experience.

I would like to have more control over the news delivery on the homepage. You now need a third-party app for this. I would also like more information in the overall To Do list. You now have to click More to see where an action item is coming from.

I would like to have more control over the news delivery on the homepage.
You now need a third-party app (we use XCC from Time To Act) for this.
I would also like more information in the overall To Do list. You now have
to click More to see where an action item is coming from. It would be
better that you can see (and sort) from which community/activity a to-do
is coming from. It would be best if you could apply filters to this list.

Ideally, the product will increment advances from consumer social networks and file sharing tools sooner, as users expectations are formed by the software they use at home and on their devices.

We suggested over 40 improvement of the system in 2014, but nothing has changed in the 4.5 version.

After a few months of using the solution, we have prepared document with the biggest failures and features to improve in the system. We have suggested over 40 improvement of the system, we have made PMR in the system:

• Movies with high resolution after uploaded in the community had bad quality, were unreadable, or we couldn’t upload files in AVI or WMV.
• The inconsistency of the editing interface between the various components (different ways of adding images to a wiki page, to a blog, or to a community description)
• Writing in the editor was treated as a lack of user activity. That means that when editing of content in a text editor for a long time, such as editing a wiki page, the session loses its validity during that time and redirects to the login screen. The previously entered content is lost.
• We couldn’t have created subfolders in Files component (after one year we bought Library component, which has possibility to create subfolders). I’m writing about the 4.5 version we had.

I’m happy with what I saw at a recent conference regarding Connections Pink and Orient Me.

For once, I would like to see better support for files. I mean, file storage is very good. It's not a concept of traditional file storage, but I figure if you want to make a transition from a traditional way of working into a new way of working, the gap between the old way and the new way, should be a little bit smaller.

Actually, I'm seeing all the previews for the IBM Connections version 6 product and I think a lot of the stuff that we would like is coming out in that version itself.

One of our VP of sales has asked for the ability to sync nested folders by using the drag and drop option, and that's going to be in there. There are some of the Community design elements, the top menu, which is something that a lot of our employees have been asking for.

So, it seems that IBM is listening to people when it comes to including new features in the latest Connections product line.

While connection supports @named.user messaging and #tag.labels, the collaborative interaction UXP could be updated to a more streamlined approach for posts, file-share and threaded conversations such as that which is provided by newer teamwork offerings (e.g., Slack).

I am alluding to the potential to improve collaboration via timely, intelligently presented alerts and notifications. Specifically, I am calling out the examples within other products, such as "bots" that do your bidding and provide calls-to-action and other reminders in context with your daily activities.

I think a little more of an integration with the calendaring features would be better. Right now, you don't have a direct integration for doing connections in your personal calendar. That's the feature that people are looking for, so I think that would help.

Communities, File sharing andkeeping up to date via the Connections activity stream.

The file plugin for Mac need some improvement.

Design and user experience.

Design: They present consistent shortcomings across their applications. For instance, when you are in a sub-community, it's difficult to figure out what other sub-communities are a part of the parent community. Whenever you land in a sub-community application, it's difficult to navigate to the parent one.

Another example is how the newsfeed tries to provide you with extra information with a blurb hovering to the right. However, it's actually the same information available on the newsfeed item.

User experience: The many ways in which you could use their different applications is, for most users, simply overwhelming.

IBM Connections can be a really good product for power users. However, for most of my users, the consistent feedback has been about how difficult it is to use and how the interface is poorly designed.

One thing that I do wish was available - and it sounded like it might be from the general side, but I'm not 100% for sure on that - is, with the Connections desktop plugin, right now, when we copy files over, we have to do it individually and create our folder structure. We can't just copy our folders over and have them all exist.

They seem to be implementing some of what we want in the upcoming versions, like an onboarding wizard. Having an easier way to integrate with other third-party tools would be really helpful. Right now, depending on the tool, it's easier or harder to integrate than it could be. That's probably one of the bigger things.

Support has got to know what they're doing. They got to have a good product, and the product has to work. We've dealt with a number of vendors for products that integrate with Connections. They advertise one thing, and it just doesn't work as advertised. It seems like everyone's in a rush to get something to market without being thorough in their testing and QA. They release a product, and that's something else that IBM is kind of bad about. They release a product that's not quite ready for prime time just so they can say, "Okay, we hit a deadline. We released it on this date." I guess in the backrooms they're thinking, "Well, we'll fix it in the next two quarters." We see the same thing with some third-party vendors.

For us in the IBM Connections Cloud, we would like to use the capability for instant messages, but we need to have the groups sync up to the cloud from the on-premise, which it doesn't do at this point of time.

Also, with the file sharing option, that is where you could sync a folder; they say that this feature should be coming soon, but we haven't seen it yet.

Development of more customized widgets as per the organization’s requirement is one area, which if improved, will attract even those employees who don't use this product often.

File management: File management is a little poor. For example, you don’t have the ability to create a folder or organize the contents of a folder. Some functionalities are available only if the customer also buys the IBM FileNet platform.

User management: Users are mainly on LDAP. There is no way to create a user “on the fly” and to add it to a community or business network. You must track all users on LDAP before interacting with them and this is very boring, especially if you have to interact with external users.

I actually work with profiles and identity, and also all the information around entities (not only geographic, but all properties assign to a employee).

My dream: Create a workflow to manage and simplify the lifecycle of a employee across the company...

My entity should be the same if I change companies; only some properties are different, but my links are the same (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

The administration part of the product could be increased. There are, for instance, lots of statistics available for the platform, but you really have to harvest them, as they are available on so many different parts of the product.

It lacks centralized product administration; you have to access different parts of the product. For some administration tasks, you need to be in the web interface of the product; for other administration tasks, you have to be on the command line of the operating system where the product is running, and so on.

Also, the different tools you have to use for day-to-day operations sometimes makes it hard to keep up with the work that needs to be done to keep the product running on a day-to-day basis.

The perfect software doesn't exist, but I think Connections is really a good piece of software with few things lacking. Probably they should also build a Windows Phone client app.

Also, IBM could develop an easy way to install the Connections platform. Currently, many steps are required and involving a skilled IBM Business Partner is mandatory for successful setup.

Our users would like to see more document management capabilities in the base IBM Connections package (without having to install extended components). Users also prefer using a traditional folder structure for organizing content and are not used to tags (might be a learning curve or resistance to change).

Our users are having difficulty grasping the concept of tags and tag clouds. They are used to placing items into folders for organization. I have attempted to explain how tags can provide the same functionality for locating content. I also showed how tags can be associated to one or more tags, which is not possible in a folder structure. I think it was resistance to change more than the inability in understanding tagging.

Without purchasing the additional add-on for document management, Connections offers the ability to make new versions, lock a file,etc. Users would also like to be able to do a check-in, check-out, and co-edit with revision control.0

• Easier way to add external users
• Easier UI customization

For us, the biggest thing we would like to see in the next release is integration with SharePoint.

The wiki is the weakest part of Connections, compared to standalone wiki solutions. It does not offer customizable templates for pages, a feature users often ask for. I would love to see improvements in this area.

• It is not easy to create a company’s Intranet home page since the home page is the first page the user lands on. IBM Connections can create many communities which link to the home page, but not the homepage itself.
• You still cannot search the contents of files inside, like words in MS Word, PowerPoint, or Adobe PDF.
• There is no project tracking function. The ‘Activity’ function is not a good feature. We need a Trello-like project management function for agile management methodology, but not only the current ProjExec function.

Activities:

• The Connections Mobile app doesn't work in the same manner as the web version. Sorting is different and not all options are available in the mobile version.
• There are limitations on how big an activity can become, but there is no functional check to let the end user know. When your activity becomes really big, it can become unreliable and very slow.
• There are no summary options for an activity. A print-to-PDF overview would be handy.
• Again, when the activity become very big, it is not easy to keep track of what happens within the activity. (Kudos Boards from ISW is a good alternative for this.)

Files:

• File sync for folders (coming in Connections 6.0)
• File sync for community files and folders
• Option to make individual files available to external users
• Option to make individual files publicly available by using a password
• Invite external users based on an email address

There are already forms in there and I like that. Addition of the workflow and Salesforce integration would be nice. We use Salesforce a lot, i.e., both audio and video content. Similarly, IBM Sametime would also be nice.

The improvement's are could be more flexibility to manage files and to have a sync file area more intuitive and which respects the characteristics of other similar solutions. That feature should be also only for personal files.

The mobile, Outlook, and desktop Plug-ins associated with this product need to be improved.

There were a few challenges that we have experienced with the stability of the Outlook Plug-in.

The mobile product within the good container is still not a fully matured product.

I have found the wiki to be lacking in functionality. We don’t use that piece, so we have another vendor for wiki.

There's nothing pressing for us about Connections itself at the moment that we are desperate for that we don't already see in version 6. The biggest benefit for us will be nested folders. Until we get nested folder support, folders within folders, we can't move away from the historical file stores on Windows.

I haven't any particular features to request. I would like to see better stability and performance.

There is an issue with scaling the Solr Search add-on (see the scalability section).

For instance, when you open a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, you just get a copy of it; you can't put it up again.

I would like to see a better UI and more user-friendly user interfaces. I would like to see them make the tool easier and more intuitive.

We hear complaints from our users that Connections, and other IBM products, are not intuitive.

The users find it difficult to find content. The menu and action buttons are not that simple. It is not easy to understand how to use the solution and what action to take.

Not all the apps work the same way with the same buttons for the same actions. An example is the tag cloud. It is not active or looks the same in each location. Sometimes there is a tag cloud in one app, but it isn't there in another app.

It does not have a very visual look and feel. There is a lot of text and many types of menus and menu columns. The locations can be one at the top, one on the left, one on the right, and each one might have a different look and feel.

Every app has its own way of working and makes it hard to understand why it all works in a different way.

It's hard to explain for me, because I've been using it for many years now. It is very familiar to me now and I'm fully used to it. But first-time users experience lots of confusion about what to use for which purpose, and how to use it.

The different Features (Blog, Wiki, Forum, ...) do not behave equally e.g. how they handle files or links. This should be improved by IBM. Also the mobile Interface (app) is good but not state-of-the-art. Workflow Features can be implemented using IBM's Forms Experience Builder but this is an additional product with additional costs. Could be improved as well. The web editor has been improved but there is always room for more Features and Functions.

I think it's a lot to do with metrics and in order to push up the momentum and get people to use it more, I need to know what's happening exactly in a more detailed kind of metric. So, if there are any problems identified exactly where it's not going wrong, this would help to understand how I can push it and what incentive I can put there.

Also the interface could be more easily accessible and easy to read as currently the interface is not.

In order to monitor the usage and encourage take up I need like a dashboard to know where things are good and where we are not picking up as we should and react accordingly.

The ability to use it as a hybrid solution. IBM has started the Connections PINK journey, and the hybrid option will be part of it.

We are watching the new IBM Connections version 6 right now; it's working right now. It would be helpful to have more interfacing of all the IBM platforms.

This product should have a way to mark Communities as favorites for quick access.

The IBM Cognitive initiative, which is an out-of-the-box feature in Connections: You don't really have to spend a lot of time with it.