Another virtual conference is over, this time with the focus on HCL Connections. Here’s the latest about Connections 7.0 and related products and strategies!
As most other user groups have had to do this year, Let’s Connect (previously Social Connections) had to go virtual. The conference took place on September 29th and 30th, and it was chock full of news from HCL regarding Connections.
You can see the whole agenda here, and there are links to the slides from each presentation as well.
On the Let’s Connect YouTube channel, you can see videos of presentations and live demos.
During the conference, HCL had a Q&A regarding the strategy around Connections 7.0 and you can read the all the questions and answers at the conference site.
And that’s not all! The conference also had a survey about the state of Connections among the customers and business partners, and all the results can be seen here. It’s a bit of an eye opener. I was surprised to see that so many felt that HCL shouldn’t focus on improving the user interface. This means that the latest changes to the UI must have been a success.
The highlights we have after going through all the material above is this:
- You can register for a public beta of V7, which has a planned release for December
- Still no proper email integration between Connections and Domino/Exchange like you have with Teams and SharePoint for Exchange
- Community templates especially designed for certain types of businesses, which you of course can adapt
- Docs seems to be dead, there are no plans for further development and HCL seems to focus on Office 365 integration, which is the right way to go
- Even better integration with Sametime is planned, but no concrete announcements were made
- SSO for Active Directory is planned to be released with 7.0!
- The Connections plugin for Notes will receive no updates for Connection 7.0 (booo!)
- The promised document workflow for Connections 7.0 will not happen. Maybe in future versions
- Outlook integration with Connections will be available from November! Yay! Sign us up for testing, HCL!
We urge you to look through the material we’ve linked to above. Lots of cool stuff coming and it’s obvious that HCL is prioritising Connections. And with even tighter integration with Office 365, it seems that even in a Office 365-company, you should be able to introduce it as a social intranet.