HCL Connections 6.5: What You Need to Know
At Collabsphere in Boston, October 28–30, 2019, those of you who attended the Connections strategy session learned what we have planned through the end of this year and heading into 2020. For those of you who couldn’t join us, here is what we shared about the upcoming Connections 6.5 release. To add, we are excited to give Connections the attention and investment it deserves and make this journey with you.
Just three months after joining HCL, we launched Connections CR6. And with the upcoming launch of Connections Release 6.5 this quarter, our first major release at HCL, our momentum is strong. We’ve been listening to you through the #LetsConnect design thinking jams, the ideas lab, through email, via social channels, and at events, and we’re rolling out new features to drive engagement and adoption. Furthermore, these new features are a direct result of your feedback. HCL Connections 6.5 is our lowest TCO version ever. It includes:
Sidebar: An always-on slide-out dashboard, which gives your users access to Connections from anywhere in your IT environment, a lifeline to your network. Employees spend 2.5 hours every day, searching for the information and expertise needed to do their jobs. Put a different way; if you hired 5 employees, only 4 would be doing actual work. Certainly, Connections Sidebar will help change this.
Touchpoint: A simple, onboarding wizard quickly connecting your new employees to the network and content they need to get started. 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced great onboarding. Connections Touchpoint simplifies new employee onboarding while helping you increase adoption for your Connections deployment.
Activities Plus: Connections now includes Activities Plus by Kudos to give lightweight activity and task management software to every employee. Any user can far easily and automatically organize tasks, teamwork, projects, and timelines directly from within their Connections environment. Above all it’s included for free when you install the Connections 6.5 Component Pack.
Elasticsearch: Connections now standardizes on Elasticsearch, reducing the server and administrator overhead required to maintain multiple search infrastructures.
Connections Customizer Lite: Connections 6.0 introduced the ability to easily personalize your Connections environment without the need to reproduce customizations when upgrading from version to version, furthermore, greatly reducing sunk costs and overall time spent personalizing deployments. Connections 6.5 introduces a Customizer Lite option that will let you deploy Customizer in a high availability environment with much less overhead – Kubernetes, Mongo and Redis are no longer required.
We hope you’ll take advantage of all the new features that will be made available to you in Connections 6.5.
Go to YouTube to see how-to and technical videos, and follow us on Twitter.
