Lotus Workplace-A Portal-Based Collaboration Platform

     

Lotus Workplace ”A Portal-Based Collaboration Platform

Lotus Workplace, made available toward the end of 2003, is a portal-based collaboration platform that lets users interact with colleagues, customers, and partners , providing immediate access to the applications and information they need to provide superior service. Because it is estimated that 80 percent of a business' knowledge resides with its people, the potential productivity gains are very significant. With Lotus Workplace there are several products that allow customers to add modular collaborative capabilities to their business applications. For example, Lotus Team Collaboration lets users instantly access people and information, minimizing the cycles associated with e-mail and voicemail "tag" and complex searches for timely information.

Lotus Workplace ties together key collaborative applications and functions based on an employee's role and delivers it through a single desktop interface. It lets a user keep an eye on important events and projects outside of the current area of focus, allowing for easy multitasking. Lotus Workplace also simplifies the user experience by enabling access to critical business information anywhere , anytime from whatever device the user chooses.

Over the years , businesses have purchased a variety of products to improve collaboration between individuals, teams , and workplace communities. The result is a disjointed user experience with multiple interfaces, each with a different sign-on. This actually impedes a user's ability to collaborate and share information, slowing productivity and response time.

The Lotus Workplace platform contains all the Lotus Collaboration capabilities ”messaging, calendaring, scheduling, awareness, contextual collaboration, documents, e-learning, and workflow. Each area of Lotus Workplace is a portlet that includes Lotus collaborative capabilities or an application based on those capabilities. Portal-based collaboration will continue to make it easier to integrate the capabilities of WebSphere and Domino/Collaboration-based applications.

Portals provide a single point of access to information. They allow businesses to operate faster and more efficiently by letting people access information and communicate across different systems in real-time via a Web browser. Lotus Workplace features components for e-mail, collaboration, content management, and learning.

IBM Lotus Workplace Web Content Management allows non-technical users to publish material within the Workplace environment, on a portal, or on an application server. The application is the result of the acquisition of Australian content-management provider, Aptrix. In addition, IBM has added features that give users the ability to import and export Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word files, as well as IBM Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Freelance files.

Additional updates to the Lotus Workplace Web Content Management tool include enhanced support for Oracle applications via the WebSphere Portal Application Integrator tool. The product extends customers' ability to access enterprise applications. For example, because the tool extends access to Oracle's human resources, finance, and manufacturing applications, a business can bring Oracle access to its employees in a centralized and integrated environment. This is a tool for the Human Resources (HR) manager who understands the HR process very well but not HTML programming.

WebSphere Portal's productivity tools, which allow users to view, create, convert, and edit basic text files, spreadsheets, and presentations without having to leave the portal environment, have also seen recent improvements. The WebSphere Portal Catalog has over 1,200 solutions and services that allow users to build and deploy portlets that provide easier access to corporate applications such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain management.

Software companies offering services for WebSphere Portal are able to make them available worldwide via the WebSphere Portal Catalog. By being able to access services via the catalog, customers have access to technology expertise, such as consulting, designing, developing, and integrating portal solutions.