Collaboration

 

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  1. Overview
  2. Domino and Extended Products Portlets
  3. Collaborative portlets
  4. Domino and Extended Products
  5. People awareness features
  6. Lotus Collaborative Services APIs

 

Overview

Collaboration features in IBM WebSphere Portal are provided through...

  • Domino Enterprise server
  • IBM Lotus Sametime
  • IBM Lotus QuickPlace

It is possible to access the functionality of Lotus Sametime and Lotus QuickPlace using only the Collaborative Services API components within WebSphere Portal, however, the Domino and Extended Products Portlets extend the capabilities beyond simple integration and access.

Portlets are the mechanism by which the Domino server products are fully integrated into WebSphere Portal. Domino and Extended Products Portlets provide an online directory with people awareness, and integrated tools for managing online meetings and Lotus QuickPlaces.

In WebSphere Portal 6.0, the 7.0 release of Domino, Lotus Sametime, and Lotus QuickPlace is supported.

 

Domino and Extended Products Portlets

Examples of all the Domino and Extended Products Portlets are supplied on the Domino Integration page. The portlets are installed with WebSphere Portal and deployed automatically, requiring of the administrator only a number of server and other configuration tasks before users can take advantage of a suite of integrated collaborative applications.

Domino and Extended Products Portlets include:

 

Collaborative portlets

In addition to the Domino and Extended Products Portlets, other collaborative portlets provide access to a variety of applications. Some portlets, such as the Common PIM portlets, can be configured to use the back-end server most appropriate to the WebSphere Portal environment.

The Inline QuickPlace portlet offers collaborative features when integrated with QuickPlace servers and Sametime Instant Messaging servers in the portal environment. The Domino Document Manager portlet allows the user to perform document and file management. Both of these portlets are installed with the portal but not deployed on sample pages; manually add them to pages in a site.

 

Domino and Extended Products

We 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:

 

Lotus Sametime features

When Lotus Sametime is enabled in the portal configuration, users can work with the complete set of people awareness functionality, which includes instant messaging and application sharing through e-meetings. Person names appear aware - 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 Sametime in the portal configuration. If Lotus Sametime 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.

 

Lotus QuickPlace features

The availability of Lotus QuickPlace portlets is not affected by the portal configuration option to enable/disable IBM Lotus QuickPlace, because portlets launch applications and services that are independent of portal configuration. As long as a QuickPlace server is available for selection and you have installed and configured a Lotus QuickPlace portlet application, portal users can add instances of Lotus QuickPlace portlets to portal pages, or simply use Lotus QuickPlace portlets in the portal pages where they participate.

 

Lotus Domino features

When a Domino server is available, portal users have access, using the Lotus Notes View 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 portlets, such as Domino Document Manager and Domino Web Access, use a Domino server configured for use in the portal.

 

People awareness features

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. The People Finder portlet is now located on the People palette for easy availability in every application.

 

Collaborative Services APIs

Lotus Collaborative Services are Java APIs that provide the building blocks for integrating the functionality of Domino, Lotus Sametime, and Lotus QuickPlace 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 Domino and Extended Products. Collaborative Services include no platform-specific code, hide the configuration details of Domino and Extended 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.

 

Parent topic:

Key features

 

Related concepts


Lotus Domino Integration