Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle

Here are the answers to some frequently asked questions about this bundle.

Q: What value does the Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle provide?
A: The Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle provides a rich collaboration solution at an exceptional value. The Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle delivers built-for-business team software, real-time web conferencing, unified communications and social software in one easy-to-buy package. Its components are built on open standards and extensible by customers and by independent software vendors. Lotus Connections, Lotus Sametime, and Lotus Quickr are flexible and designed to integrate into your current environment, running on multiple server operating systems and working with multiple releases of desktop software.

Benefits of the IBM Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle:

• Allows for quick access to information and experts from an expanded professional network, with a complete array of tools for working together, to help execute business tasks and make faster decisions.

• Helps effectively share information and knowledge across the organization with security-rich storage so they are not lost as employees move about.

• Extends collaboration across geographic locations. Your organization can share information with and leverage teams from across the globe to achieve optimal results.

• Provides a cost-effective, consistent approach to real-time collaboration within an encrypted, authenticated, managed environment.

• Helps increase confidence in decision-making by facilitating participation by experts across the organization and reflecting past experience.

• Helps organize communities of employees, partners, and customers to innovate and drive growth in the business.

Q: If you are an existing Lotus CEO Enhanced Collaboration customer, why should you consider trading up to this bundle?
A: The Lotus CEO Enhanced Collaboration bundle which includes Lotus Sametime and Lotus QuickPlace® (predecessor to Lotus Quickr) is one of IBM's most popular and successful CEO bundles. And, if you are a current Lotus CEO Enhanced Collaboration bundle customer enjoying the rich collaborative benefits of Lotus Sametime and Lotus QuickPlace, you know why it's so popular. Now, that collaborative value is extended even further with this Lotus CEO Community Collaboration offering which adds all the benefits of Lotus Connections to the mix.

IBM Lotus Connections, is the industry's first social software designed specifically for business. It lets you utilize the collective knowledge of your organization, your partners and your customers by dynamically building new connections between people, the information they know and the tasks they are executing. Lotus Connections includes:

• directory and expertise location

• tools for creating and managing communities of interest

• blogging capability

• innovative social bookmarking for helping you find pre-qualified information faster

• a new activities tool to help you manage all the information and people associated with a specific task

Q: Why would you as an existing Lotus QuickPlace, Lotus Sametime or Lotus Connections customer be interested in this full bundle?
A: When Lotus Sametime, Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections are deployed simultaneously to an organization, the full collaborative benefits of these solutions working together can be realized. Not only does each product deliver a set of powerful capabilities, but the integration between the products - now and even further integration currently planned in future releases- sets the standard for collaborative productivity. Today, Lotus Quickr team software provides built-in connectors to desktop applications like Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, Microsoft® Office and Microsoft Windows® Explorer. Additionally, when Lotus Sametime is installed and configured, any user's name within Lotus Quickr or Lotus Connections profiles is turned on, so users can immediately communicate with them, in context. Also, using a Lotus Sametime extension plug-in, chats can be saved to an activity and activities related to a particular person can be viewed. Business cards from Lotus Connections can be displayed within Lotus Sametime... and more.

Q. How can you tell if this packaged solution is right for your organization?
A: Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle is well suited for organizations of any size that need a way to help employees more effectively find and work with each other and/or with partners and customers. Value add integration with Lotus Notes and with Microsoft Office will make this bundle very useful and attractive to both Lotus Notes and non-Lotus Notes customers.

So, if you are looking to:

• Make the organization more responsive and competitive

• Bring new employees up to speed more quickly and ensure that organizational knowledge does not leave when employees leave the organization

• Provide electronic environment that fosters innovation and teamwork across the organization - regardless of geographic location

• Help employees execute more informed decisions more quickly

• Help employees deal with information and e-mail overload

• Help employees have access to the right information and right experts in timely manner

• Provide consistency of information and knowledge across teams

• Reduce ramp and cycle times to respond to customer and market demands

• Capture and reuse learnings from previously successful projects

• Reduce travel costs and burdens of working in geographically dispersed locations and engaging with customers

Then the Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle might be the best fit and value for you. Since Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle requires minimum purchase commitment, it is best suited for organizations that want to bring the benefits of team and real-time collaboration together with social networking for business to their entire organization.

Q: I have a current subscription to the IBM Lotus CEO Enhanced Collaboration bundle today. How do I take advantage of this new bundle?
A: For existing IBM Lotus CEO Enhanced Collaboration customers on active software maintenance, we have provided a trade-up SKU to the IBM Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle.

Q: My organization is no longer on active maintenance for Lotus CEO Enhanced Collaboration bundle, but we may want to reinstate our software maintenance. How do we take advantage of the Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle?
A: This would be a two-step purchase: 1) Purchase the reinstatement SKU for IBM Lotus CEO Enhanced Collaboration and then 2) Purchase the trade-up SKU from IBM Lotus CEO Enhanced Collaboration to IBM Lotus CEO Community Collaboration.

Q: My organization is a licensee of IBM WebSphere® Portal Extend with active software maintenance. How can we take advantage of the Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle?
A: WebSphere Portal Extend customers with active software maintenance are already entitled to Lotus Sametime and Lotus Quickr for use inside the portal. If your organization wants to remove the portal only restrictions of using Lotus Sametime and Lotus Quickr and also wants to purchase Lotus Connections, then you can purchase the IBM Lotus CEO Community Collaboration bundle.

Q: My organization is a WebSphere Portal customer and we prefer to purchase using a per CPU or PVU charge metric? Is there a way for us to purchase Lotus CEO Community Collaboration on a PVU basis?
A: Not at this time. All CEO bundles are on a per user basis. Individually, Lotus Sametime (web conferencing), Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections each offer per PVU options for extranet or anonymous use. (Please refer to the Lotus Sametime, Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections licensing for details).