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...

We know you’re anxious to get your hands on the new Connections software release due out later this year. We are excited to share that our hosted Connections v7 preview site is now live. Sign up now and you’ll be able to try out pre-release software for our new tailored experience Community features, integration with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, and more. You will also have a chance to provide feedback to the development team and get your questions answered. Our new capabilities featured in the Connections v7 preview include: Delivering a tailored Community experience Reusable templates to get teams up and running faster. Improved Community layout options for a more customized experience. Simplified Community creation to save time getting started. Enhanced Microsoft ecosystem support Link Microsoft Teams and your Communities for a more seamless experience. Access SharePoint files/folders without leaving your Connections application. Easily print Connections content or save as a PDF file Don’t miss your opportunity to test drive our new functionality in this software release preview. And remember to provide your feedback to us.  Our customers are an integral part of our product evolution, and your feedback is invaluable to our continued commitment of delivering the best collaborative solution in the market. Register Now for the Connections v7 preview:  https://hclsw.co/cxn-7-pre

There are many reasons you should be planning an upgrade to the latest version of HCL Connections, since it drives greater adoption and creates a more engaged workforce within your organization. One of the key new features in Connections 6.5 is the integration at no charge of Kudos Activities Plus, a rapid, agile project management capability that gives your teams a way to reach their goals faster.   The redesigned Activities features in Connections 6.5 provide an intuitive, user-friendly interface and a lightweight project management tool that helps people align resources, tools, and knowledge to get work done. Assigning tasks and due dates are core to making sure projects get done on time and within budget. Kudos Activities Plus lets Connections customers manage tasks and projects on both mobile and desktop devices.  Any HCL Connections user can now easily and quickly organize tasks, teamwork, projects, and schedules directly from within their Connections environment. This new capability is free when you install the Connections 6.5 Component Pack.    Activities Plus is also fully integrated with Microsoft 365 (Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook) for users who want to combine the benefits of both Connections and Microsoft 365 — Kudos Activities Plus is accessible from within both environments. This advanced integration enables adding Activities to Microsoft Teams, sharing them via email, and adding files to OneDrive and directly to SharePoint as a Site Page as part of your SharePoint workspace.    Find out more here, and schedule a demo here.  

Making sure your teams are inspired and engaged in their work can be challenging — and with more teams working remotely around the world, this matters more than ever. A recent Gallup study1 indicated that only a third of employees are truly engaged in their work. Gallup went on to say that organizations with higher engagement levels are not only more productive, they achieve four times higher earnings per share growth. One of the reasons employees become disengaged is because they’re unable to find what they need to do their jobs — or because of a lack of information in general. It’s been estimated that employees can spend up to eight hours a week searching for information they require for their role (this means that 20% of the time, or one full day a week, work isn’t actually getting done!). HCL Connections has communication hubs to deliver relevant information more quickly and efficiently. Communities help connect people to the experts they need to get more work done. Not knowing where a file is, who sent it or how, and which version is the latest one also means that teams can waste crucial hours and weeks trying to find what it is they need just to do their job. The shared document repository that Connections is built on maintains one instance of the file — a single version of the truth. This means that the exact same version of the file is available in both your personal folder and in all the communities it has been shared to. Anyone accessing the file, no matter which community they are in, will always see the latest version. Fundamental to an organization’s success is creating a positive and productive work environment and culture. Employees who interact frequently with their teammates are more likely to share insights, willingly contribute to projects and take...

One of the most common pain points at every single organization is not being able to find a file or project when you need to. Did someone email it to you or was it sent to you in an HCL Sametime message? Or maybe someone uploaded it to Microsoft Teams? Was it saved to a shared file-server but you just can’t remember which directory? Then, when you find what you were looking for, it can get more confusing. Is this the latest version… and who do I even ask to find out? Should I email that person, message that person? Look through all the versions and try and figure it out myself? All of this can be not just frustrating, but also a colossal waste of time. And, making matters worse, what if you’re on deadline, or someone is out of the office? What if it’s urgent?   HCL Connections helps solve this omnipresent problem in multiple ways. The shared document repository that Connections is built on maintains one instance of the file. This means that the exact same version of the file is available in both your personal folder and in all the communities it has been shared to. Anyone accessing the file, no matter which community they are in, will always see the latest version. In addition, multiple team members can make contributions and edits simultaneously using HCL Connections Docs’ collaborative editing capability, transforming and speeding up the way we work while maintaining the “single version of the truth.”  Because the way we work is becoming increasingly decentralized — and especially now, with the reality of a pandemic changing the way we work on a global scale — being productive, regardless of work location, is a necessity. When you need to access a document, HCL Connections is where you find the “single version of truth” repository. One document, accessible from anywhere. Never worry whether or not you have the latest version ever again.

We in Digital Solutions marketing are new to HCL. And we have a lot to do. The recent logo and branding re-imagining and the launch that we broadcast live from Tokyo is the beginning of a new era.   From a marketing perspective, we wanted to signal a change, put a flag in the ground to say, “Forget what you knew about these products; it’s time to look forward.” And after only a few weeks, we delivered an entirely new brand with new logos and creative under HCL Digital Solutions. We leaned heavily into a new color pallet, and completely redesigned all product logos. It was a chance, not one often given to marketers, to remake something that is already well-known and revered.   Our lead designer on the project was Liam McCormick, and I think he describes the design system best when he tells us, ”We went in search of something in HCL’s history that we could build upon, and what we found was what we considered the design DNA in the original HCL logo — it is shear angle of 24.24 degrees. We took that angle and built a grid system, and (take or leave a few hundred iterations) the new logo family was born from this original structure which can always be traced back to the mother brand of HCL.” And trust me, we could not have had better talent working on this redesign (Liam also helped design the Cisco WebEx and Vodafone logos). But that wasn’t all we needed to do. We needed to capitalize on the momentum started with the launch of HCL Domino v10 to the rest of the portfolio. The first out of the gate on October 7, 2019, was HCL Digital Experience 9.5, a proven digital experience management platform and the very...