Level: Introductory Dick McCarrick, Content Developer, IBM
21 Jun 2004 Learn about all the new features available in release 2.0 of the IBM Lotus Workplace products including IBM Lotus Workplace Documents and IBM Workplace Client Technology.
It doesn't seem all that long ago that we were anticipating the upcoming next generation (next gen) of Lotus products, the suite of products that would eventually be christened IBM Lotus Workplace. Since that time, Lotus Workplace has grown and matured through release 1.1, offering a set of collaborative tools that help you navigate between email, instant messaging, on-line learning courses, and content publishing. (For an introduction to Lotus Workplace, see the article, "What is IBM Lotus Workplace?")
This maturation process continues in release 2.0 of the Lotus Workplace product family. In release 2.0, existing Lotus Workplace products, such as IBM Lotus Workplace Messaging and IBM Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration, have been significantly enhanced. In addition, this release offers new Lotus Workplace functionality, such as Lotus Workplace Documents and IBM Workplace Client Technology.
This article presents a high-level overview of the new features introduced in this release of the Lotus Workplace products. We'll look at enhancements to previously released Lotus Workplace products, as well as new components that we've added. We'll conclude with a brief preview of some of the features that may be included in future releases. Although you don't need any prior experience with Lotus Workplace to understand this article, some familiarity with IBM/Lotus collaboration tools, such as Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing (Sametime), will be helpful.
Lotus Workplace Documents
A major new addition in release 2.0 is IBM Lotus Workplace Documents. This product provides centralized, standards-based document management, allowing your users to create, organize, and share documents in a secure environment. You can access Lotus Workplace Documents through your browser or via the new add-in Lotus Workplace rich client (described later in this article). To open Lotus Workplace Documents through your browser, log into the Lotus Workplace desktop. If Lotus Workplace Documents is installed and you have access to it, you'll see a tab labeled Documents. Click this tab to open Lotus Workplace Documents.
Lotus Workplace Documents includes library services for document check-in/check-out, locking, and versioning. It also offers word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation editors that allow users to edit documents even when the editors with which these documents were originally created are unavailable.
Long-time Notes and Domino users will find that Lotus Workplace Documents offers a number of "Notes-like" security and convenience features. For example, when using the rich client you have the option of working on your documents off-line, connecting to the server only to synchronize the changes that you made to local copies of the libraries. This can help reduce load on your server and improve your response time. You can store documents locally in an encrypted data store. And you can create personalized views of document libraries, helping you find and organize the content you need.
Lotus Workplace Documents is tightly integrated with other Lotus Workplace functionality. This provides collaboration and workflow features, such as document reviews, approval processes, search, and versioning. The product also incorporates presence awareness for document authors/editors/owners by integrating instant messaging capabilities. For example, if you are reading a document and have a question for the author, you can examine the author's name to determine whether or not that person is on-line and available. If so, you can contact the author and ask your question in real time and receive an immediate answer.
Equally important, Lotus Workplace Documents offers a number of security features to ensure the safety and integrity of your documents. The product provides a structured access model, giving you a relatively quick and easy way to manage access to document libraries. For example, you can set up a library so that some of its content can be viewed across your organization, while other content is limited to a smaller need to know audience. In addition, users can store their documents outside the server file system, helping secure it against unauthorized access or damage.
For more information about Lotus Workplace Documents, visit its product page.
IBM Workplace Client Technology
Another important new addition introduced in release 2.0 is IBM Workplace Client Technology. This is a set of tools for building small-footprint, server-managed client applications. These client applications can cover the full spectrum of complexity and sophistication -- anything from relatively simple devices, such as industrial controllers, all the way to full-featured 32-bit desktops. In release 2.0, IBM Workplace Client Technology has been built into two products, Lotus Workplace Messaging and Lotus Workplace Documents, to allow you to take advantage of the rich client editions of these two products. (Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration instant messaging will also include support for IBM Workplace Client Technology in an upcoming release.)
With IBM Workplace Client Technology, you can extend management and security features found in server-based platforms to the user's desktop and other devices. This allows you to build reusable rich client applications, giving you the flexibility and portability of client-side applications combined with the server-side control and cost-savings of Web-based computing.
IBM Workplace Client Technology is built upon standards-based components from a number of different technologies, including the Eclipse 3.0 open standard. Eclipse is an open-source platform for creating integrated development environments (IDE's) for a wide variety of applications. In IBM Workplace Client Technology, an Eclipse plug-in processes Lotus Workplace files and provides a tool-specific user interface. When users run an application built on IBM Workplace Client Technology, they are presented with an integrated set of plug-ins. (In some respects, these plug-ins can be considered the desktop equivalent of a server-based portal.) The local data store is based on Cloudscape (a small footprint, Java-based, SQL database derived from DB2). This data store supports working off-line, encrypted storage, and full-text search. SyncML (an XML protocol originally designed to standardize data synchronization between wireless devices) provides synchronization functionality, similar to Notes-based replication.
This focus on standards-based functionality helps ensure applications you develop with IBM Workplace Client Technology can be easily integrated with other applications. This in turn provides you with the potential for developing client applications that allow users to access their critical information and applications at any time from a variety of different devices without losing any of the functionality they've grown accustomed to with rich client software.
System administrators can also benefit from IBM Workplace Client Technology by taking advantage of its dynamic provisioning, "no-touch" deployment features, and policy-based management. You can install, update, and uninstall applications through server-based dynamic provisioning. This can help to significantly reduce the overhead involved in managing your end-users' desktops. And it offers a full range of security features, including user policies for managing user access to features and applications as well as user rights and permissions in those applications. (We talk more about provisioning and policies later in this article.)
IBM Workplace Client Technology supports a number of operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and (in an upcoming release) Apple Macintosh. It also supports several mobile devices. IBM Workplace Client Technology is available in two editions, Micro Edition (for PvC devices) and Rich Client Edition (for desktop PCs). For more information on IBM Workplace Client Technology, see its product page.
Lotus Workplace rich client
An example of IBM Workplace Client Technology "in action" is the Lotus Workplace server-managed client, also known as the rich client. The rich client is an optional add-in application built on IBM Workplace Client Technology. Lotus Workplace Documents and Lotus Workplace Messaging both support the rich client. (Lotus Workplace instant messaging will support the rich client in a future release.) Users can access Lotus Workplace Messaging and Lotus Workplace Documents through the rich client, as an alternative to accessing these products through the Web browser. When they do, they have available to them IBM Workplace Client Technology functionality, such as synchronization, off-line support, search, and document editors. This gives users a more full-featured rich client experience than is possible through a browser.
To use the rich client, users must download it from the Lotus Workplace server onto their desktops. Figure 1 shows the rich client interface:
Figure 1. Rich client
As you can see, the rich client gives you a single point of entry for Lotus Workplace products and functionality. The interface presents frames for working with email, viewing and creating documents, managing your calendar, and instant messaging. It also provides links to other available Lotus Workplace features such as Web conferences, team spaces, and learning.
When users open Lotus Workplace Messaging or Lotus Workplace Documents with the rich client, they can perform "Notes-like" tasks, including working off-line and synchronizing a local copy of a document with its server-based copy. They can also set their preferences and manage their local security settings.
The rich client includes its own on-line help, which you can read to learn about the document editors and all other available features.
Lotus Workplace Messaging
Up to now, we've talked about brand new functionality introduced in release 2.0 of the Lotus Workplace products. Now let's look at how existing Lotus Workplace products have been enhanced, starting with Lotus Workplace Messaging.
Lotus Workplace Messaging 2.0 is a standards-based mail infrastructure designed for easy deployment, scalability, and security. It integrates with your existing email system, using your user directory to manage user accounts, to resolve addresses, and to route mail. In addition, Lotus Workplace Messaging 2.0 includes an address book for managing personal contacts and group mailing lists and a personal calendar (more on this later in this section).
Previous releases of Lotus Workplace Messaging were designed to meet the needs of the "underserved" community, users who traditionally have had no dedicated desktop access. And Lotus Workplace Messaging 2.0 is still intended to meet the needs of this audience, offering a full set of features accessible through a Web browser. However, it now includes additional features that make it a more robust application within the IBM Workplace Client Technology environment, especially when accessed via the rich client. For instance, Lotus Workplace Messaging 2.0 lets you create nested folders. It's also integrated with Lotus Workplace Documents, making it easier for you to archive and manage messages and attachments.
When accessing Lotus Workplace Messaging through the rich client, you can work with your mail file off-line. You can then reconnect to a server and synchronize your changes. While off-line, you can:
- Create new messages and reply to ones you have received. When you switch back to on-line work, these messages/replies are delivered as soon as you synchronize.
- Check spelling.
- Use type-ahead to address messages. As you type a person's name into the address field, Lotus Workplace Messaging finds the name (based on the letters that you have typed) and fills in the address.
In environments where users access Lotus Workplace Messaging through the rich client, administrators have all the previously mentioned IBM Workplace Client Technology system management features at their disposal, including dynamic client installation, configuration, and upgrades.
In addition, Lotus Workplace Messaging includes a new smart spam filter. This filter automatically learns to identify email as junk mail for each user. The filter classifies email as spam based on spam-like characteristics of the email and the number of similar, previous messages that the recipient has identified as spam. (NOTE: The spam filter is a technical preview feature.)
Calendar
One component of Lotus Workplace Messaging 2.0 that has been significantly enhanced is the calendar. For instance, the calendar portlet now supports meetings and workflow. Previous releases of the calendar allowed you to create appointments, reminders, and other types of events. In Lotus Workplace Messaging 2.0, you can now create meetings and Web conferences, events to which you can invite other coworkers and track their responses to your invitation.
The Lotus Workplace Messaging 2.0 calendar also offers a team calendar. This is similar to a personal calendar, except it is shared by all the members of a team space. If your organization has a team space license enabled, by default the team calendar is available when you create a new team space using the Team Project template. The team calendar resides on a team space and is accessible only to the team space members.
The new Web conference event serves as the front end to Web conference integration, allowing you to use the calendar to manage invitees to your Web conferences. If Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration 2.0 (of which Web Conferences is a part) is installed and you have been given sufficient access to create Web conferences, the New Web Conference button appears on your Calendar tab. This displays the New Web Conference page, through which you can create and edit the conference on the personal calendar or team calendar and Web conference server. (You can create a Web conference from either your personal calendar or a team calendar. You can also create Web conferences the old fashioned way through the Web Conferences tab itself.)
In addition, the calendar in Lotus Workplace Messaging 2.0 includes a number of usability enhancements, including a one-week view of the calendar, collapsible sections on the event pages, and the ability to print notices and events. And you can customize the calendar view to change its appearance. For detailed information, see the developerWorks:Lotus article, "New calendar features in Lotus Workplace Messaging 2.0."
Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration
Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration 2.0 integrates instant messaging and presence awareness, Web conferencing, and customizable team spaces, combining features found in Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing (Sametime) and Lotus Team Workplace (QuickPlace). With Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration you can attend on-line meetings, create libraries, and interact with team members through on-line chats, threaded discussion forums, and document sharing.
Lotus Workplace Builder and other application development features
Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration 2.0 offers a number of new features designed to make it easier to develop and manage applications built on top of Lotus Workplace functionality. This includes new and enhanced templates for creating applications, including Team Discussion, Document Library, Team Project, and Domino applications. Another new feature is Lotus Workplace Builder, a tool for assembling applications built from Lotus Workplace collaborative components and forms. With Lotus Workplace Builder, you can create and manage templates for Lotus Workplace applications. You can create applications from these templates and save the application as a template for future applications.
Lotus Workplace Builder includes the Workplace Template Library. This contains the list of available templates. In the Template Library, you can create new templates, assign roles for template access (Template Editor or Template User), delete templates, and open the template editor to modify a template. The template editor displays portlets for template maintenance, including Properties, Parameters, Pages and Layout, and Roles. Lotus Workplace Builder also contains a Form Template Library for creating, editing, and managing form templates. Also included is the application editor, a set of portlets for maintaining Lotus Workplace applications.
Other Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration 2.0 enhancements
Additional new features in Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration 2.0 include:
Enhanced team spaces
Team spaces now includes support for tasks, email notifications (even when Lotus Workplace Messaging is not licensed), and team space search.
Instant messaging and presence awareness coexistence
The instant messaging and presence awareness features in Lotus Workplace can now coexist with the separate Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing (Sametime) product. Users can now use both at the same time. Internally, instant messaging now includes a native Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) infrastructure.
Web conferencing
In addition to the previously discussed calendar integration with Web conferences, enhancements include support for repeating meetings, in-meeting agenda/access management, team calendar integration, and support for more file formats.
Lotus Workplace Collaborative Learning
Lotus Workplace Collaborative Learning is a learning management system modeled upon the Lotus Learning Management System (LMS) architecture. Lotus Workplace Collaborative Learning 2.0 provides closer integration with Lotus Workplace Messaging and Team Collaboration, giving you better collaboration and on-line access to people, information, and processes.
The single most significant addition introduced in Lotus Workplace Collaborative Learning 2.0 is the new Skills Management and Career Development feature. This lets managers automate the process of matching available courses to users based on the skills they need to perform their job responsibilities. If assigned the appropriate permissions, a manager can create a "skills dictionary." The manager can then use the skills dictionary to define the skill levels required for various jobs and automatically assign training requirements to build those skills. Employees can review their personalized learning plans to help them close their skills gaps. Reporting tools track each student's progress with their learning plans.
For more information, visit the Lotus Workplace Collaborative Learning home page.
Lotus Workplace administration
So far we've talked about all the great new features that release 2.0 of the Lotus Workplace products offer the end user and the application developer. Of course, this new functionality is of limited usefulness if it's difficult to deploy and manage. Not to worry because this release also offers a number of enhancements to make the administrator's life easier. Chief among these are provisioning and user policies.
Provisioning
Provisioning is designed to reduce the administration overhead required to deploy and update IBM Workplace Client Technology applications, such as the rich client. The provisioning server provides client applications to the user's workstation during installation of the rich client. Each time the user subsequently logs into the rich client, a provisioning agent dynamically checks the provisioning server to determine whether there are any updates or new components available. If so, the user is prompted to download the updates. This process removes the need for the administrator to be actively involved every time a user needs an update.
Policies
User policies allow administrators to manage user access to Lotus Workplace features, applications, and products. These include messaging, document libraries, instant messaging, Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration components, and so on. You can define a single policy to apply to all users, different policies for specific groups, or even a policy that only applies to a single individual. You create user policies through the WebSphere Administrative Console or the Lmadmin CreatePolicy command.
Other administration enhancements
Each Lotus Workplace product comes with a configuration checklist. The configuration checklists contain post-installation tasks to get components up and running quickly.
The new archive utility saves user-deleted and expired messages to disk. (Expired messages are ones that have been automatically removed from the user's mail box when it exceeds the maximum disk space quota set in the user policy.) When a user needs a mail message restored, you can selectively restore the messages that were deleted on a particular day.
Another new messaging-related administration feature is mail cell routing. This feature helps make address lookups and mail routing to other mail cells easier. With mail cell routing, you no longer need to extend your LDAP directory schema to include mail cell objects. Instead, you can simply register other mail cells in your mail cell. This allows users to look up email addresses of other users in the same domain, even if they are using other mail systems.
For more information on these and all other administration features in release 2.0, see the Lotus Workplace on-line help.
Lotus Workplace: more to come!
As this article indicates, release 2.0 is a significant step in the evolution of the Lotus Workplace family of products, introducing significant new components such as Lotus Workplace Documents and IBM Workplace Client Technology. Clearly, next gen has become "now gen" -- an industrial-strength platform for creating and hosting your critical enterprise applications and processes, built on industry standards and proven IBM/Lotus technologies.
Of course, no one succeeds in this industry by standing around idle for long. We're already planning even more features for upcoming releases of Lotus Workplace products. For example, we've already mentioned that we plan to incorporate support for the rich client in Lotus Workplace instant messaging. We also plan to offer tools to help migrate users to the Lotus Workplace platform. And we will publish the Lotus Workplace APIs, so programmers can get busy developing their own applications built on Lotus Workplace functionality. And that's just for starters. To learn more about Lotus Workplace and to keep abreast of the latest developments, see the Lotus Workplace products page.
Resources
About the author  | | | Dick McCarrick is a content developer for developerWorks: Lotus (formerly the Lotus Developer Domain). Previously he was a member of the Domino/Notes Documentation team for over 11 years, playing a variety of roles in documenting many major components of Domino and Notes. He also wrote the occasional article for Iris Today (including Ask Professor INI) before joining the Notes.net/Lotus Developer Domain team permanently in 2002. In his spare time, Dick's leisure activities include running, fishing, woodworking, and reading about the natural sciences. An avid astronomer, he's former director of the Bridgewater (Mass.) State College Observatory. Dick lives in Vermont. |
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