HCL Connections v7 Is Here
Staying connected at work is more critical than ever. Speed and efficiency are paramount, and communication is more and more vital. You can’t afford to get this wrong. The latest version of HCL Connections is here and it helps teams and organizations overcome workplace challenges and helps create solutions better than ever before.
HCL Connections v7 provides the structure to close information and communication gaps. It drives efficiencies for teams that are working remotely and enables employees to get project teams up and running more quickly, to interact more seamlessly with other team applications, and drastically reduce deployment and upgrade cycles. Connections keeps project teams connected, helps manage communication around strategy and shifting business focus. And it helps promote a strong sense of community for employees — especially important as we work through the last months of this global pandemic. Unlike other collaboration platforms that require tiresome toggling between application silos, HCL Connections delivers an intuitive experience that delivers team content, news, conversations, and project tasks all in one place.
HCL Connections v7 lets you deliver these innovations and more:
- Jumpstart your project teams and make success repeatable: get your teams up and running 80% faster with new, easy-to-use set-up Community wizard and templates built upon your best practices. Templates save time and help drive increased consistency that promotes successful results.
- Integrate the power of HCL Connections with Microsoft 365® eco-system: leverage the value of your Connections people-powered communities and content into your Microsoft applications. Readily access and share critical knowledge, conversations, and content in your communities. Make teamwork more seamless — built-in integration amplifies team communication, decision velocity, and productivity. Accelerate discovery and decision-making and remove boundaries with one–click access to content, conversations, and expertise.
- Reduce IT costs and headaches with cloud–native support: deploy powerful new features 90% faster with component pack and cloud native support. Deploying and upgrading is dramatically faster and easier with new component pack installation scripts which automate deployment. Easily deploy the latest functionality with a cloud-native version of Component Pack (Amazon EKS and RedHat OpenShift).
Connections enables a structured, collaborative approach for teams to get their work done. It offers a seamless work experience and the flexibility to work anywhere, anytime. People power your business. Connections v7 powers your people.
Indeed, Dan. Maybe the key line of your blog post – for me at least – is “HCL Connections delivers an intuitive experience that delivers team content, news, conversations, and project tasks all in one place.” Well used, the magic of HCL Connections really is in the amalgamated flow of updates from all across the collaborative ecosystem. You don’t have to scan umpteen chat clients and several file storages. It’s all there. All in HCL Connections. Your teams and communities of interest, your files, their files, everybody else’s files, conversations, updates, blogs, wikis……the entire spectrum of facets and features to collaborate and communicate.
Wherever you turn, these days, one of the top three complaints of people who have been forced to work remotely, as unprepared as their employers, is the lack of connectedness. Not only the obvious social dimension of lack of contact with your closest colleagues, but also feeling out of the loop, fear of missing out on important information and events and the struggle of working together remotely.
What people complain less about – so far, but probably because the danger hasn’t dawned on them yet – is the risk of group think when only collaborating and communicating with the people you already know, be it via email, chat or video meetings. A major loss for companies – at least those who lack a collaborative mindset (and tools like HCL Connections) – is a slow-down of creativity, innovation, knowledge-sharing and of ineffective communications via a multitude of filters (a.k.a. middle management) – as employees who only work via group chats, team rooms, email and video meetings only get exposed to the same first-hand contacts all the time. The power of weak ties is completely lost.
You make a very valid point. Building new relationships can be challenging in a remote work environment. Building trust is critical to building relationships. Trust is accomplished by being consistent, collaborative, and transparent with information and needs. HCL Connections helps build this trust by providing a platform to enable and encourage a collaborative environment, and ensuring information is shared transparently. A consistent approach, like Connections, can make a difference.