Collaboration

 

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Overview

WebSphere Portal collaboration products include:

 

Collaboration Center

The Collaboration Center is a set of pages containing instances of eight collaborative portlets. The Collaboration Center is installed with WebSphere Portal and the portlets deployed automatically, requiring of the portal administrator only a limited number of server and other configuration tasks before users can take advantage of a suite of integrated collaborative applications.

The Collaboration Center offers the enhanced set of pages and portlet instances available from the WebSphere Portal Zone as the Domino Extended Products Portlets. The Collaboration Center is installed with this release of WebSphere Portal, or can be previewed separately by downloading it from the WebSphere Portal Zone.

Collaboration Center portlets include:

 

Collaborative portlets

In addition to the Collaboration Center, other collaborative portlets from IBM Lotus Software provide access to a variety of applications. Some portlets, such as Common Mail, Common Calendar, and Search Center, can be configured to use the back-end server most appropriate to your WebSphere Portal environment.

Portlets such as Inline Team Workplaces and Lotus Instant Messaging Connect offer collaborative features when integrated with Lotus Team Workplace servers and Lotus Instant Messaging servers in your portal environment.

 

Domino and Extended Products

You can enhance the collaborative features of WebSphere Portal, and add features such as people awareness to collaborative portlets, by choosing to install and enable any of the following Domino and Extended products:

 

IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing features

When Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing is enabled in your portal configuration, portal users can work with the complete set of people awareness functionality, which includes instant messaging and application sharing through e-meetings. Person names appear with a dynamic online status indicator and as hyperlinks that open the Person menu. The Person menu can include the following options:

  • Chat
  • Add to Instant Contacts

You might choose not to enable Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing in your portal configuration. If Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing is not enabled, then people awareness functionality will be restricted to the following features:

  • People's names appear as hyperlinks, but with no people awareness icon next to each name

  • The Person menu will appear when a user clicks a name shown as a hyperlink, but menu options will be limited to actions, such as Send E-mail, that are native to WebSphere Portal.

 

IBM Lotus Domino features

When a Lotus Domino server is available, portal users have access, using the Notes and Domino portlet, to any Lotus Notes database on the server. Other portlets, such as Common Mail and Common Calendar, can also use a Domino back-end server. And other applications, such as Domino Document Manager and Domino Web Access (iNotes), use a Domino server configured for use in the portal.

 

People awareness features

In this release of WebSphere Portal, in addition to person links and the Person menu previously available, people awareness features include the ability to configure the contact information, such as telephone number, that appears on a person link.

 

Lotus Collaborative Services APIs

Lotus Collaborative Services are Java APIs that provide the building blocks for integrating the functionality of IBM Lotus Domino, IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing, and IBM Lotus Team Workplaces into the portal and portlets. Using Collaborative Services, application developers can design and implement user interface extensions in portals and portlets that extend the functionality of collaborative portlets.

The primary goal of Collaborative Services is to provide the data for portlets' user interface and to allow developers to execute actions on installed Lotus products. Collaborative Services include no platform-specific code, hide the configuration details of Lotus Software products installed in the enterprise, and (except for the Person tag) are user interface neutral. Application developers can add collaborative functionality to a portlet without having to know the details of server configuration and with total control of user interface design and implementation. These benefits make Collaborative Services effective for implementing mobile applications.

 

Marc Paginer - 2005 Portal Conference

 

IBM Workplace Collaboration Services

Goal is to integrate collaboration products such as Quickplace, Instant Messaging, people awareness.

Team places are areas where teams go to collaborate. There is a membership for a team place. there may be permanent chats for the team. There are specific portlets and document libraries for this team. For example, a sales team place. IBM has a model where there are templates for rolling out team places to different constituencies.

IBM provides these templates out of the box.

Templates can be things like agendas, vacation requests, etc...

 

See also

  1. Plan for collaboration
  2. People awareness
  3. Collaborative Services API
  4. Working with the Collaboration Center
  5. Collaborative portlets
  6. Key features

     

    WebSphere is a trademark of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.

     

    IBM is a trademark of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.