| Lotus collaboration products, mostly based on Lotus Notes and Domino, are the premier offerings in the field of collaboration. WebSphere is IBM's premier entry in the area of tools for building Web sites. Thus, for companies that have a Web application that requires the strengths of Lotus collaboration offerings (e.g., Teamrooms, Knowledge Bases, Corporate Portals, Help Desks, Sales Force Automation, Web Meetings that include "chat," Project Tracking, Intranets, built-in messaging, etc.) and the strengths of WebSphere (e-commerce, Brokerages, B2B Exchanges, Supply Chain Integration, Online Banking, Web Account Access, Web Portals, Extranets, etc.), a combined Lotus Domino and WebSphere system would be ideal. In addition to details on how to have WebSphere and Domino work together, this book discusses how to use the new Lotus Workplace products and WebSphere Portal as ways to implement collaboration tools with WebSphere. There are several ways to implement Lotus collaborative solutions with WebSphere, and this book discusses the options. One of the significant growth areas for many companies has been commerce between companies, or business-to-business (B2B) commerce. B2B commerce requires much greater need for relationships and collaborative technologies (such as Web conferencing and "chat") to facilitate purchasing for large, complex transactions between teams of people. Also, sites with just transactional capabilities are realizing that they could increase the amount and frequency of purchasing by assisting transactions. If a company is building Web applications that focus on collaboration, Domino is an excellent choice since Domino excels when an application requires sophisticated collaborative capabilities, such as workflow and distributed content authoring, or deals with a lot of unstructured data or knowledge. Likewise, if a company is building a Web site that needs to handle a lot of transactions or requires the use of Enterprise Java components , then WebSphere is the good choice since WebSphere excels when an application requires industrial-strength transaction management or massive scalability, or where business logic is wholly encapsulated in distributed components such as servlets or Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs). If a company needs to build a site that requires both of these capabilities, then Domino and WebSphere can work together over the same or separate HTTP stacks to deliver the best of both worlds . The main idea behind the use of collaboration tools for corporations should be to help in making business processes more efficient and effective. This book addresses the needs of those IT architects , network designers, and Web system developers who must help implement Web systems to meet requirements for both collaboration and Web services. |
