Collaboration

Collaboration features help people in your organization work together and share information online to achieve their business goals. A collaborative portal can improve the responsiveness, innovation, competencies, and efficiency of your organization. WebSphere Portal offers features from IBM Lotus Software that enhance collaboration for portal users:

 

Lotus collaborative portlets

Collaborative portlets from IBM Lotus Software provide access to a variety of collaborative applications that use Lotus Notes databases that are hosted on Domino servers: the Notes and Domino portlet offers Mail, Calendar, To Do, Notes View, TeamRoom, and Discussion, while the Domino Web Access (iNotes) portlet offers Mail, Calendar, To Do, Contacts, and Notebook. Other portlets from IBM Lotus Software include Quick Appointment, Quick e-Mail, and Web Page. Still others, such as Inline QuickPlace, offer additional features when you have chosen to integrate Lotus Companion Products in your portal environment.

 

Lotus Companion Products

You can enhance the collaborative features of WebSphere Portal and add features such as people awareness and information discovery to Lotus business portlets, by choosing to install and enable any of the following companion products for advanced collaboration from IBM Lotus Software:

  • Lotus Sametime adds the online status indicator to people links and adds actions to people link menus.

  • Lotus QuickPlace provides access, from a collaborative portlet, to the QuickPlace server and the team workspaces that it hosts.

  • Lotus Discovery Server adds actions to people link menus and provides access to Knowledge Map components from collaborative portlets. The expertise location feature of Discovery Server is available from within the Discovery Server portlets and from the added people link actions.

Lotus Sametime features

When Sametime 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. With Sametime enabled, people appear with a dynamic online status indicator, and their names appear as hyperlinks. People link menus include the following options:

  • Chat

  • Add to Contact List

You might choose not to enable Sametime in your portal configuration. If 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

  • People menus still appear when a user clicks a name shown as a hyperlink, but menu options are limited to the following actions, which are native to WebSphere Portal (or to Lotus Discovery Server) and are not Sametime actions:

    • Send E-mail

    • Show Profile (if Lotus Discovery Server is installed)

    • Find Documents Authored By (if Lotus Discovery Server is installed)

Lotus QuickPlace features

The availability of QuickPlace portlets is not affected by the portal configuration option to enable or disable 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 the QuickPlace portlet application, portal users can add instances of QuickPlace portlets to portal pages or use QuickPlace portlets in the portal pages where they participate.

Lotus Discovery Server features

When Discovery Server is enabled in your portal configuration, portal users have access to the Knowledge Map of your enterprise content repositories and expertise profiles for the people in your enterprise. Discovery Server extends the basic content and people awareness of WebSphere Portal to include the following features:

  • People link menus include actions for getting additional information about people and documents:

    • Show Profile (Discovery Server expertise locator and affinity generation component)

      This action displays the person's profile of business card information, contact information, affinities, current job, and background.

    • Find Documents Authored By (Discovery Server Knowledge Map features)

      This action launches Knowledge Map Search of all documents that the person has authored.

  • The WebSphere Portal navigation bar includes the Expertise Profile icon, which opens the people profiles that are generated and maintained by the Discovery Server.

  • Discovery Server portlets are available for installation, configuration, and deployment:

    • Knowledge Map portlet

    • Search Results portlet

    • Mini-Search portlet

 

Lotus Collaborative Components

Lotus Collaborative Components are Java APIs that provide the building blocks for integrating the functionality of Domino, Lotus Sametime, Lotus QuickPlace, and Lotus Discovery Server into portals and portlets. Using Lotus Collaborative Components, application developers can design and implement user interface extensions in portals and portlets that extend the functionality of Lotus Software collaboration products.

The primary goal of Lotus Collaborative Components is to provide the data for the portlet user interface and to allow developers to execute actions on installed Lotus products. Lotus Collaborative Components include no platform-specific code, hide the configuration details of Lotus Software products that are installed in the enterprise, and (except for the PeopleService tags) 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 Lotus Collaborative Components effective for implementing mobile applications.

 

Collaboration Center

Collaboration Center comprises the following portlets, which offer integrated features to improve user productivity, and can be deployed in WebSphere Portal in addition to Lotus Collaborative Components and Lotus collaborative portlets.


 

See also