Collaboration and communication solutions Executive Brief November 2005 IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 software: the new face of business collaboration and communications.
Contents 2 Executive summary 3 The modern collaborative environment 6 IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 software 10 Becoming comfortable with change 10 The story of Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino and IBM Workplace software 11 The future of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software Executive summary In today s organization, success no longer depends solely on what you do or what you offer it is what you know that matters most. Or rather, what your people know. According to Forrester Research, your employees knowledge has become a key asset: Today, more than 85 percent of a typical S&P 500 company s market value is the result of intangible assets. For many companies, the bulk of these intangible assets is its people, its human capital. 1 Over the years, organizations have spent considerable amounts of money on managing and organizing this knowledge. However, the very way in which information is being exchanged is shifting and is forcing companies to change how they manage their most important asset. Rather than sharing information in conference rooms, through memos and written reports, or even over the phone, people are turning to online venues to communicate what they know. They are storing data in e-mails and in their heads, rather than in centralized databases. And they are developing ad hoc ways to collaborate and get work done, relying on e-mail, instant messaging and online, teambased, electronic user environments as their tools of choice. E-mail is only the beginning of this trend in information management. Newer and evolving online collaboration capabilities are providing people with new ways to access the information they need from one another as they perform their jobs. With tools such as business instant messaging, pervasive online awareness, Web conferencing, portals and intranets, workers are better able to find the information, people and subject-matter experts they need, when they need them. IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 software reflects these changes. Increasing organizational productivity and responsiveness, the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino platform doesn t just support the way people work
today it establishes the foundation for a future of increasing emphasis on collaboration. The latest release of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software represents a significant step forward, by enabling communication capabilities that go far beyond e-mail to help you better harness your most important asset your employees knowledge. This executive brief looks at how organizations are using IBM technology to their advantage to create new collaborative opportunities for their workers. It describes how Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 software takes the lead in enabling and enhancing collaboration and communications, and discusses the role of the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 offerings within the IBM Workplace software family. Finally, it examines the future of the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino platform and what these new developments will mean for your company. The modern collaborative environment Successful businesses have always understood the importance of collaboration. Until recently, however, collaboration for most companies remained focused on traditional, well-established methods of communication, such as meetings and conference calls. So when companies first began to implement messaging systems, they typically were concerned only with providing their employees with the basics: e-mail, scheduling software and contact management capabilities. Over time, though, as their employees became increasingly reliant on e-mail as a key communications tool, organizations that were overwhelmed by the torrent of messages being sent and stored began to look for ways to help their users share information more effectively with each other.
IBM responded to this need by creating and expanding the reach of IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software. Today, the software family offers an easy-to-use environment that enables collaboration among colleagues, vendors, partners and customers. With Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software, workers can use tools such as: Web conferencing: Brings people together in a virtual and secure online conference room, regardless of where they are located. Users can run training sessions, share information and presentations, and work together as a team to solve problems and make decisions. Conferences can be set up on the fly, without IT support. Pervasive instant messaging: Provides instant, anytime access to people and information. You can see if someone is available to communicate instantly online, and initiate virtual conversations that allow you to share information and collaborate in real time. Team spaces: Allow for the creation of online user environments that enable the centralization and sharing of information associated with specific projects. Through a team space, users can assign tasks, disseminate information and gather consensus on projects. Yet far from being dwarfed by these newer collaboration tools, e-mail still remains a dominant force in the world of corporate communications. For this reason, IBM has continued to focus on helping users better manage the information they receive via e-mail, while also allowing them to perform much of their work from within their e-mail boxes. With each release of Lotus Notes software, IBM has added new e-mail management features and search capabilities that have helped users increase their productivity. In addition, by integrating e-mail with applications such as word processing, spreadsheet and project management software, Lotus Notes software saves workers from having to switch back and forth among the information and tools they use most.
At the same time, companies have begun to recognize that they often need to support different types of employees. Decision makers and mobile workers depend on a variety of devices to quickly and easily access company data, from laptops and desktop computers to personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. Other office workers are more focused on managing information, tasks and their schedules in the office. And deskless workers, such as employees on the factory floor, do not require dedicated computers and only need occasional access to their e-mail and calendars. IBM offers a range of messaging and collaboration products designed to fulfill the requirements of these different types of workers, many of whom can be found in the same organization. In addition, IBM has built flexibility into Lotus Domino server software, enabling IT departments to offer different clients to different types of users, yet manage them all through a single Lotus Domino server back end. For example, office workers can use the more robust Lotus Notes client for messaging and collaboration, while deskless employees can access their e-mail on a shared computer or kiosk through a Web browser. Individual users can also rely on different clients to meet different needs. This means they can access their e-mail through the Lotus Notes client in the office, or by using a Web browser while at home or on the road. Companies are able to extend the necessary capabilities to the employees who need them, and save money where more robust functionality is not necessary. Of course, collaboration involves more than sending e-mail back and forth or engaging in impromptu online business conversations. Work must be performed and in many organizations this involves the sequential completion of tasks. One person s completed job marks the beginning of another person s responsibility. With Lotus Domino software, companies can easily create customized, automated workflows to streamline the flow of documents and tasks.
Rather than relying on people to remember to whom and where to send an item after completing a task, the system does it for them, increasing efficiencies and productivity while ensuring the right tasks are completed in the right order. IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 software The latest release of the IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino platform includes updates made to the entire family, including applications such as: Lotus Notes software: The premier integrated desktop messaging and collaboration client provides users with a single point of access to e-mail, calendar and scheduling capabilities, business instant messaging, discussion forums, collaborative team rooms, document libraries and personal information management tools. Lotus Domino software: Designed to help you increase your users and IT staff s efficiency, the feature-rich server offering lets you quickly and easily deploy collaborative applications on a variety of hardware platforms and operating systems. Extended platform products: Offerings such as IBM Lotus Domino Web Access, IBM Lotus Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook, IBM Lotus Domino Document Manager, IBM Lotus Domino Designer, IBM Lotus Sametime, and IBM Lotus QuickPlace software extend the functionality of the core Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 solution, providing your organization with the tools to develop new collaboration capabilities, enhance communications and increase information-management efficiencies. Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 software offers a number of new features to help you increase productivity and collaboration capabilities, streamline communications, lower your total cost of ownership (TCO) and leverage your employees knowledge to your advantage.
Create a more productive user environment As workers become inundated with information, helping them manage it will play a significant role in helping to increase their productivity. Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 productivity enhancements build on a foundation first established in release 6.5. Helping users manage huge amounts of e-mail Lotus Notes 7 software gives users new tools to help them better manage their e-mail. Inbox icons, such as the new attention indicators, let workers quickly sort through and prioritize their messages, while the show mail threads option allows users to view all associated threads in an e-mail discussion so that they can easily track progress on a particular issue. In addition, Lotus Notes 7 software offers enhanced filing capabilities to make it easier for users to organize and find their stored e-mail messages. Enabling collaboration with other system users The Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 platform offers new and enhanced collaboration capabilities. It has expanded online presence awareness throughout the system, so that workers can quickly determine if colleagues or other system users are available for immediate, real-time consultation or feedback. This means that whatever the user may be doing at the time reading e-mail, reviewing the list of messages in his or her e-mail box, sending a meeting invitation or working in a team room he or she can immediately begin an online conversation by clicking on the recipient s name. And since instant messaging conversations can result in the exchange of valuable information, Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 software now gives users greater control over users online exchanges, allowing them to save instant messaging sessions to an e-mail, file them in folders and access them at a later date. Users can also use the system s integrated Web conference capabilities to collaborate on projects and share information, documents and applications in real time.
Protecting work Even if you give your employees the tools they need to work more efficiently, any gains you may see could be lost if you aren t able to protect their work. With its new built-in autosave feature, Lotus Notes 7 software helps you prevent data loss due to software errors, power outages or workstation failures. It also provides a user-optional prompt that confirms whether or not users wish to close the client, keeping them from accidentally shutting down the program. Simplifying the user experience To make its messaging software even easier for users to work with, the latest release of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software gives users more control over the appearance of the client, allowing them to establish which windows open automatically when the Lotus Notes client is launched. This lets them configure Lotus Notes software to better meet their working style and needs. Experience true savings One of the key benefits of Lotus Domino 7 software is the lower TCO it delivers by increasing performance and scalability, and simplifying administration. The newest release has been designed with system performance in mind, and will let you support more users with fewer servers and network resources. Beta test statistics demonstrate the savings, showing that Lotus Domino 7 software uses 25 percent fewer CPU resources than Lotus Domino 6.5 software. In addition, depending on the platform, it can support 50 to 80 percent more Lotus Notes users, on the same server hardware, than the previous version. 2 The results are equally impressive for organizations in which users access their e-mail via the Web, indicating a 33 to 100 percent increase in scalability over the previous version of Lotus Domino software, as well as a 40 percent improvement in client-side response time.
Lotus Domino 7 server software also offers new administration tools to help streamline the deployment, management and support of your messaging and collaboration system. These tools, such as Lotus Domino domain monitoring, which automates problem determination and analysis, will simplify administration tasks and save you time and money by proactively monitoring your systems for potential problems. Other tools will allow your IT department to: Minimize disruptions by predicting growth requirements to more accurately plan for hardware and software changes. Automate installation and upgrade processes. Easily exercise administrative control over the system as needed. In addition, Lotus Domino 7 software helps ensure you can continue to use existing systems by providing support for a variety of hardware platforms and operating systems. Since it also works with a number of client options, it increases your flexibility in how you deploy your messaging system, allowing you to extend your communications network to desktops running clients such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook software, Web browsers running on Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems, and mobile devices. And with built-in backward compatibility, Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 software protects your past investments, allowing you to continue using collaborative applications built based on earlier versions of the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino platform. Make an investment in your future Data generated and gathered through your messaging system can be of great value throughout your organization. Lotus Domino 7 server software offers enhanced integration with IBM DB2 Universal Database software, enabling you to build new applications that blend collaborative services with relational data stored in DB2 databases. Furthermore, the platform s integrated Web services capabilities and support of open standards let your IT staff expose
10 Lotus Domino applications to other systems and additional user communities. Best of all, the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino platform s clear and solid roadmap will ensure that any applications you build now will be supported over time. Becoming comfortable with change While the world of enterprise messaging and collaboration continues to change for the better, these changes are also causing uneasiness among organizations concerned about the effects of software upgrades on existing systems. With IBM Lotus products, you can rest easy. Instead of a typical rip-and-replace architectural migration path, IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software lets you gradually take advantage of new features within a new release, lessening the potential impact on your infrastructure. In addition, since Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino products have always remained compatible with previous releases, organizations can be assured that any changes they make will not force them to lose their investments in applications developed based on the platform. The story of Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino and IBM Workplace software When IBM first introduced IBM Workplace software, IBM wanted to provide users with an environment that would allow them to consolidate whatever resources they might need, such as collaboration capabilities, business processes, information, documents and productivity tools. All would be available through a unified interface to reduce the need for users to search through their computers for information or applications they needed to do their jobs. From the beginning, the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino platform has played a key role as part of the Workplace environment and will continue to do so as it evolves. Today, IBM is focused on bringing the benefits of the IBM Workplace software model to the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software family. Lotus Notes 6.5 users first saw this convergence with the introduction of a Workplace start-up welcome page that provides convenient access to communication and collaboration tools as well as documents and other resources. Also, with
11 the release of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 software, IBM has begun to integrate the messaging and collaboration system s capabilities into the IBM Workplace Collab oration Services software family by enabling organizations to access Lotus Notes applications from within the IBM Workplace Managed Client environment. In addition, the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 release includes several features to increase interoperability with the IBM Workplace Collaboration Services platform, such as its support for IBM DB2 database software and Web services. The future of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software The focus on innovative collaboration capabilities will extend far beyond the latest release of the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino platform. Even before the release of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 7 software, IBM began making public its vision for the platform with the announcement of the next release of Lotus Notes software, codenamed Hannover. Development of the product has focused on giving users new, more productive ways to view and work with information by extending the activity-centric collaboration capabilities of the IBM Workplace environment to the Lotus Notes client, so that workers will be better able to organize, navigate, manage and share information associated with a particular project or activity. And with its support of composite applications, which allow for the inclusion of functions developed on the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) into Lotus Domino applications, Hannover will enable developers to easily create a role-based dashboard that can integrate components from other applications into the traditional Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino application framework. With Hannover, IBM will continue to focus on enhancing the core capabilities of the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino platform, while integrating into it the knowledge IBM has gained from the development of its Workplace system, ensuring that years of innovation and enhancements will remain available for Lotus Notes users. Companies will be able to easily take advantage of these enhancements just by staying current with Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software and in doing so, be able to protect and extend investments in their existing Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino infrastructure.
For more information To learn more about how the IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software family can benefit your organization, visit: ibm.com/software/lotus Copyright IBM Corporation 2005 Software Group One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America 11-05 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, DB2, DB2 Universal Database, Domino, Lotus, Lotus Notes, Notes, the On Demand Business logo, QuickPlace, Sametime, Workplace and Workplace Managed Client are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Java and all Java-based trademarks are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States, other countries, or both. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. The information contained in this documentation is provided for informational purposes only. While efforts were made to verify the completeness and accuracy of the information contained in this documentation, it is provided as is without warranty of any kind, express or implied. In addition, this information is based on IBM s current product plans and strategy, which are subject to change by IBM without notice. IBM shall not be responsible for any damages arising out of the use of, or otherwise related to, this documentation or any other documentation. Nothing contained in this documentation is intended to, nor shall have the effect of, creating any warranties or representations from IBM (or its suppliers or licensors), or altering the terms and conditions of the applicable license agreement governing the use of IBM software. 1 Forrester Research. Best Practices in IT Human Capital Management. February 28, 2005. 2 Based on Domino beta 3 release statistics. GC28-7702-00