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Migrate from IBM Connections to Office 365 and Beezy

8/13/15 10:52 PM

Why are organizations increasingly adopting social platforms? Probably because the collaboration and knowledge management platforms of the past have serious adoption and usability problems. Case in point: while SharePoint has continued to grow and thrive, the platform has struggled to keep pace with many of the consumer social tools available on the market, and as end users have gone around their IT departments to find tools that better match the way they want to work, organizations have begun looking at options that will provide enterprise-grade collaboration features with more social features. Let's face it: the ways in which we collaborate are becoming more social. In fact, in a recent blog post, Beezy CEO Jordi Plana commented that "social collaboration has become a redundant concept. In today's workplace every form of collaboration is social by definition."

For many organizations, collaboration its less about documents and process, and more about connecting with people -- in real time, as well as through various asynchronous capabilities, like email. SharePoint has fallen short for many companies with a disjointed and disconnected strategy for social, which is why some organizations have turned to competitive platform like IBM Connections. For organizations who adopt Connections, its largely because of the strong social networking capability, focused on empowering and engaging with people. SharePoint social features out-of-the-box simply do not have the social networking capability of Connections. Even with Yammer in the mix, it is a disconnected user experience, at best, and one that requires a lot of manual intervention to connect SharePoint team sites and templates to relevant Yammer groups, which is accomplished through the use (and very manual setup) of embed feeds.

End users want the technology they use to fit the way they work -- which is why so many gravitate toward the latest consumer-driven social tools. What people do not want are tools and solutions that require them to work a different way, just to fit with the limitations of the technology.

At Beezy, we regularly meet with companies who want to make the move from Connections over to Office 365, or are running both SharePoint and Connections, and want the option of consolidating their platforms down to one. And thanks to Beezy's expanded feature set on top of SharePoint, IBM Connections customers have a one-to-one feature match AND a way to migrate their social content, conversations, and history to Office 365.

Beezy’s focus is to develop solutions that support “mobile-first, cloud-first, user-first” collaboration. Our “user-first” strategy is not just window trimming: it's at the core of the solutions we bring to market. It’s the difference between a beautifully defined UI yet poorly adopted platform, versus one that end users actually embrace and use. We are developing revolutionary solutions for the evolving workplace with a sole focus on making end-users happy. Why? Because collaboration doesn't work if nobody shows up.

As we announced back in May, Beezy is the only ISV offering the ability to migrate from competitive social platforms IBM Connections, Jive, and Sitrion (formerly NewsGator) to SharePoint -- either on-premises or online. Organizations that may have left the SharePoint platform because of the lack of parity with competing social solutions now have a path back to the platform, allowing them to take full advantage of the business process and productivity capabilities of SharePoint without giving up the flexibility and user experience of Connections. With the combination of SharePoint and Beezy, you can have it all.

As I mentioned in a prior post on migrating from Jive to SharePoint and Beezy, we have the ability to migrate 100% of your IBM Connections data, functionality, and community history -- and we even extend the social experience beyond their platform. How can we do this? By mapping anything and everything within Connections (as well as Jive and Sitrion) to Office 365 (or SharePoint on prem) and Beezy, allowing our customers to consolidate their collaboration activities onto  the Microsoft stack without fear of losing data or their community momentum. We are able to create the necessary placeholders for every content type and social artifact, migrate them across, and then customize your new environment to meet your unique business needs. It's not just a UI change, but a software solution with an award-winning user experience.

Come see for yourself why Beezy is different. Contact us to schedule a private demo and to learn how Beezy can help you move your IBM Connections environment (or Jive, or NewsGator) to Office 365.

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