IBM s Internal Use of Web Conferencing and IM Collaboration Tools

     

IBM's Internal Use of Web Conferencing and IM Collaboration Tools

This section gives examples of how IBM has used the Domino- and WebSphere-based collaboration tools of Web conferencing and Instant Messaging (IM) internally to significantly increase productivity. In a sense, this section discusses how IBM "eats its own cooking." Of course, large companies like IBM have always used extensive collaboration between employees, suppliers, and customers as part of the business process. However, the need for collaboration tools in large companies has never been greater. Only a few years ago, the employees in most IBM departments were all located in the same building and collaboration occurred when those employees frequently met in conference rooms, in individual offices, or even around the water cooler. Now, at IBM and other large companies, the employees in a department and certainly the employees working on the same project are usually scattered around the country and frequently around the world. An "ad hoc" meeting in an office or around the water cooler is no longer a collaboration option. Virtual meetings using Web conferencing and TeamRooms or virtual water cooler collaboration via instant messaging is now the requirement. Without the new electronic collaboration tools available to IBM employees internally, the business process would be far less productive.

IBM Web Conferencing Internal Design and Utilization

IBM's internal design and architecture for Web conferencing is very similar to the global Web conferencing offering described in the previous section. IBM has had an internal Web conferencing system (to which customers and vendors could be invited) since January 2000. The system was always based on the Lotus Sametime web conferencing product, but the code to manage and allow meetings to be spread over many room servers was developed internally. IBM's earliest web conferencing systems allowed customers and vendors to join IBM web meetings from an Internet Sametime server that was "invited" to join the meeting on a server on IBM's internal network. However, toward the end of February 2004, IBM migrated to a system based on Lotus Sametime 3.1 and the Lotus Enterprise Meeting Server (EMS) used to manage meeting distribution across nine Room Servers.

The usage statistics for the first three months of operation of this new system are shown in Table 15-1. The usage information shows that on average, there are only about around 4 to 5 users per meeting. Thus, for IBM internally, the meetings tend to be small but long (three- hour meetings). Meetings on IBM's commercial web conferencing also tend to be small, but are considerably shorter in duration. One difference, of course, between IBM's commercial offering and IBM's internal system is cost. With the internal IBM system, the moderator's department does get charged, but the charge is modest so the meetings might tend to be longer. IBM's internal system is worldwide, and many meetings include customers and vendors (about 10% of attendees are not IBM employees). All Web conferencing servers are at one IBM server farm in Southbury, CT. There are nine Sametime 3.1 room servers, two EMS servers running on a clustered WebSphere Application Server base, two MQ servers, two LDAP servers, and two DB2 servers. Statistics for Table 15-1 were taken from the DB2 server. All users (IBM and customer/vendor) must be authenticated. The IBM Unified LDAP Directory with over 2 million entries (including 340,000 IBMers) is used for authenticating Web conferencing users for the internal system.

Table 15-1. IBM Internal Web Conferencing: Usage for the First Three Months on New System

Month 2004	Total Users	Average # Users per Meeting	Largest Meeting Size (# of Users)	Number of Meetings	Total Connect Hours	Average Hours per Meeting
March	74,223	4.03	281	18,424	53,829	2.92
April	78,515	3.93	297	19,960	65,798	3.30
May	80,556	4.67	170	17,263	68,516	3.97

The EMS server does a good job load balancing meetings over the nine Sametime 3.1 Room Servers. Table 15-2 shows the distribution of meetings for the first three months of operation. The use of this Lotus EMS web conferencing system has served as a "proving ground" for IBM's commercial offering. When this section was written, it was the largest deployment of Lotus EMS web conferencing to date. As with IBM's commercial Web conferencing offering, the internal deployment will be upgrading to Sametime 6.5.1 and Domino 6.5.1.

Table 15-2. IBM Internal Web Conferencing: Usage by Room Server for the First Three Months on New System

Lotus Room Server	Total Users	Average # Users per Meeting	Largest Meeting Size (# of Users)	Number of Meetings	Total Connect Hours	Average Hours per Meeting
D02XDB054	25,029	4.11	214	6094	20,693	3.40
D02XDB055	26,749	4.27	125	6265	21,696	3.46
D02XDB056	27,016	4.05	85	6676	22,255	3.33
D02XDB057	24,351	4.08	113	5973	20,328	3.40
D02XDB058	24,555	4.21	98	5835	20,213	3.46
D02XDB059	26,389	4.41	170	5980	20,070	3.36
D02XDB060	26,351	4.01	145	6576	21,637	3.29
D02XDB061	26,487	4.23	297	6262	20,988	3.35
D02XDB062	26,367	4.40	281	5986	20,264	3.39

IBM Instant Messaging Internal Design and Utilization

IBM internally uses instant messaging based on the Lotus Sametime 3.1 product. All Sametime 3.1 servers for IBM worldwide are based at IBM's server farm in Boulder, Colorado. There are 285 thousand registered users with 150 thousand concurrent users. The typical volume is five million chat messages a day. Instant Messaging (IM) is ubiquitous within IBM. The current IM deployment consists of four Sametime 3.1 servers that are supported by 10 MUX servers. IBM plans to implement a second "hot swappable" site at Southbury, CT, for disaster recovery. Also, Sametime 3.1 will be updated to IBM Lotus Instant Messaging 6.5.1. Most IBMers would be lost without the IM capability to anyone in IBM worldwide. One area that is lacking in the current implementation is easy IM access to customers, vendors, and others outside IBM. Currently, IBM's Sametime link to AOL Instant Messaging is the method often used to communicate with people outside IBM. However, use of the SIP Gateway and the use of SIP and SIMPLE standards by all vendors will soon dramatically change IBM's instant messaging capabilities.

SIP and SIMPLE

The key to allowing everyone to communicate easily with Instant Messaging is the use of standard protocols and standard encryption methods . Session Initiation Protocol ( SIP ) is a standard protocol defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). SIP is an application-layer signaling protocol with rules that govern interactive, multimedia sessions, including presence and instant messaging. SIP is used by the Lotus Instant Messaging product (Sametime) and uses existing transport protocols, like TCP, to initiate a session. In addition, SIP can modify or terminate a session. SIP is a control protocol that doesn't care about content. With SIP, users are identified by a Uniform Reference Identifier (URI). When you connect with a SIP server, you send a registration to the Lotus Sametime server that includes your URI. A SIP Registrar stores your registration information on the SIP server. If another user wants to create a session with you, the Sametime server locates you using your URI. The same thing happens when another user subscribes to your presence or sends you an instant message ”the server uses your URI to locate you. The SIP URI uses the format sip:username@domainname, which is the same format as an Internet email address. Typically, SIP uses a user's email address as a Uniform Reference Identifier. Within IBM and for most companies and communities a user's email address is also used for instant messaging.

SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) is an emerging standard based on the Session Initiation Protocol. SIMPLE is an extension of SIP that enables awareness and instant messaging. The SIP Registrar uses your registration information for call routing. SIMPLE extends call routing to online status to ask for presence and to provide instant messaging. The Sametime SIP Gateway supports SIMPLE, and as other instant messaging vendors, such as AOL and Microsoft, support SIMPLE, you will be able to connect your Sametime community with third-party SIP-enabled communities.

To connect your Lotus Web Conferencing (Sametime) server to a separate Sametime community, you need the Sametime SIP Gateway and the SIP Connector. The other community that you are connecting with needs a SIP Gateway and a SIP Connector as well. Together the SIP Gateway and SIP Connector act as a SIP proxy server. The SIP Connector creates the connections to other SIP-enabled communities. It is responsible for both networking and the preliminary parsing of instant messages. The SIP Gateway also processes messages, but the primary responsibility of the gateway is to provide translation between the SIP network and your Sametime community.

Security

Once you start connecting your SIP-enabled community to other SIP-enabled communities, security becomes a big concern. You can determine which communities you connect with when you configure the SIP Gateway. In addition, the Sametime SIP Gateway addresses server-to-server authentication through IP addresses, which is how Sametime currently authenticates servers. When a SIP Connector connects with another server, it first checks whether or not the external community is enabled. Whether or not a community is enabled is determined when you configure the documents in the Sametime Configuration database. When you enable a connection to another SIP-enabled community, you list the DNS domains of that external community. If the community is enabled but the SIP Connector can't find a proxy server for the external community, the SIP Connector uses the DNS to create a connection. When an external server tries to connect to your Sametime community, your SIP Connector attempts to find the name of the proxy server using DNS. If the IP address of the proxy server matches the IP address that the message came from, then the Connector accepts the connection. If the two IP addresses don't match, the Connector rejects the connection.

Encryption

The latest Web browsers support the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol and so does the SIP Gateway. TLS is an Internet protocol that prevents third parties from listening in or tampering with a message communicated between a server and client. Because the SIP Gateway supports connections to other communities, Lotus Sametime 3.x uses the TLS protocol to encrypt messages sent between servers, between servers and SIP Gateways, and between SIP Gateways.

The Ultimate Solution

When everyone is using SIP and SIMPLE and the SIP Gateway, you'll be able to see when any contact you have in the world is online and communicate with that person instantaneously. This could be construed as good or bad ”but it will certainly aid in collaboration. Users with such ubiquitous instant messaging capabilities have to be willing to be quite "interrupt driven."