IBM Office of the CIO implements IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 for open, efficient communication and collaboration

Why IBM?

IBM integrates market-leading messaging, collaboration, information management and business productivity tools and provides an enterprise application development environment, support for open standards and composite applications; the IBM open collaboration client solution offers a security-rich and cost-effective platform



Working with colleagues, customers and partners scattered around the world is becoming more commonplace in many industries. At IBM, large, mobile, global teams are the baseline. “Worldwide, we have 450,000 end users in 64 countries across 2,041 locations,” says John Walicki, open client architect for the IBM Office of the CIO.

As working with team members on multiple continents and in multiple time zones increasingly becomes the rule rather than the exception, daily communication and collaboration take on new dimensions. “I’m in my home office in New Jersey and I talk to someone in every corner of the world on a daily basis: Brazil, China, Europe and people throughout the United States,” says Walicki, adding that this is a common scenario for IBM end users, who often are not tied to a consistent office location. “Roughly 40 percent [of IBM employees] work from home or customer locations, and more than 70 percent of them use laptop computers.”

Communication becomes even more challenging when a conversation needs to be scheduled or involves more than two people. “Clearing time on four calendars in three different time zones is no picnic,” says Walicki.

IBM’s globally dispersed and varied workforce also generates and processes massive amounts of information. That information is delivered in a myriad of formats, including desktop documents, messages from group mailing lists, metrics and logs from automated monitoring applications and updates to corporate wiki knowledge bases, blogs and other Web sites. “IBM has a tremendous information-sharing infrastructure,” says Walicki. “For example, we have 29,000 wikis that generate a combined total of 1 million page views every day. The variety is amazing, but users need tools to handle the information flow.”

Meeting these high-performance communication and collaboration needs would be a challenge even if every IBM end user had identical hardware and software. But cost-effectively delivering IT services to a user population so numerous that it could qualify as one of the 100 largest cities in the United States requires a strategy much more sophisticated than broad standardization. “One-size-fits-all computing does not cover business needs anymore,” says Walicki. “A user in Sao Paulo isn’t going to have the same hardware as a user in London or Beijing, and a field consultant doesn’t need the same software as someone in a call center.”

Instead, the IBM Office of the CIO uses a role-based computing strategy, employing Linux and other open-standards tools and applications to deliver finely differentiated computing environments according to a user’s working needs. “With a Linux desktop client—a security-rich desktop alternative —we can deliver specific functionality that’s tightly integrated and tailored to a user’s job requirements and hardware capabilities at a lower cost. We have around 30,000 IBM end users using this open collaboration client solution with Linux,” explains Walicki.

“Using open standards like OpenDocument Format (ODF) in Lotus Symphony instead of continuing to support only proprietary document formats means that our users can create and collaborate on documents without having to worry if their documents will be accessible across the company, either today or in the future,” continues Walicki. “Use of open standards keeps IBM flexible and agile; we have more opportunities to find lower cost options, and we can simplify our operations and focus on business value.”

The Office of the CIO needed a communication and collaboration solution that would work with its role-based computing strategy. The solution needed to work smoothly across heterogeneous environments, enable end users to efficiently communicate and collaborate with their IT colleagues around the globe and help users effectively manage high volumes of information.

To meet these requirements, the Office of the CIO is rolling out the Lotus Notes and Domino 8 messaging and collaboration environment to IBM end users, starting with the Office of the CIO. The latest version of Lotus Notes and Domino software features improved and more tightly integrated e-mail, contacts and calendaring tools. With an integrated and fully functional Lotus Sametime instant messaging client, Lotus Notes and Domino 8 also enable users to communicate quickly and effectively with their colleagues. Integrated Lotus Symphony office tools enable users to create, edit and view documents, spreadsheets and presentations in a wide variety of formats, including OpenDocument Format, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and Microsoft Office.

The new release also supports the capability of combining elements from diverse applications and data streams for fast creation of composite applications. An intuitive interface—uniform across Microsoft Windows and Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop)—helps simplify navigation and provides quick access to tools, applications and information. The customizable user interface, with Eclipse-based Lotus Expeditor as its foundation, enables users to define their own workspace with the features that they use most, such as day-at-a-glance calendar views, a robust set of activity-centric collaboration repositories, RSS feeds and instant message contact lists.

“The Lotus portfolio provides an open, powerful desktop platform, with differentiated collaboration and communication capabilities that support role-based execution of business processes in a global, heterogeneous environment and provide an alternative to Microsoft software,” says Walicki.

Interface integration and task automation help save time and increase user productivity
CEO, CFO, CIO and human capital management studies, as well as Global Innovation Outlook projects conducted by IBM in 2007, point to collaboration in context as the key enabler for enterprise adaptability and innovation. At IBM, supporting collaboration in context involves leveraging the new features of Lotus Notes and Domino 8 to directly address the communication and collaboration challenges faced by IBM workers.

For example, the tightly integrated e-mail, calendaring and contact features can help users to perform common tasks, such as scheduling meetings, more efficiently. The time saved can increase productivity by enabling knowledge workers to focus on the content of their activities rather than on tools and logistics. “If I’m swapping e-mails with somebody and I need to schedule a call with them, I can just right-click on their name, bring up their calendar and find an open time, and I’m done,” says Walicki. “With Lotus Notes 8, scheduling and coordination tasks that I do every day take a couple of seconds instead of many minutes.”

Similarly, Lotus Notes and Domino 8 software can save users time and help them be more productive by automating short but repetitive and labor-intensive tasks. “On days when I had a series of back-to-back phone meetings, I would print out my calendar so that I wouldn’t waste time hunting for dial-in information,” says Walicki. “Now, I can click on the phone number in the Lotus Notes 8 calendar entry and the soft phone automatically dials and logs me into the conference. That automation removes a stumbling block from my day.”

Tools to manage information flow help increase efficiency
Information management tools, like the RSS reader built into the Lotus Notes 8 client, can improve productivity by helping users navigate the oceans of information generated by IBM workers. Users can harvest the data critical to them and customize the delivery to match their work needs. “I can subscribe to feeds and have updates delivered to my work space instead of having to hunt them down on a blog or wiki,” says Derek Burt, associate IT architect for the Office of the CIO. “The Lotus Notes 8 feed reader makes it easy to build communities and pull experts into a team, no matter where they’re located or what time zone they’re in. That improves the quality of the teams that we build and ultimately improves the quality of the products that IBM creates.”

Open standards and integration help increase productivity, reduce hardware costs
Lotus Notes 8 supports the role-based computing strategy at IBM, helping the Office of the CIO reduce infrastructure and support costs by closely tailoring client deployments to the specific business needs of the end user. “With Lotus Notes 8 and the Lotus Symphony editors, we can reconfigure a two-year-old system with 1 GB of memory that’s struggling to keep up with other applications,” says Walicki. “The worker gets all of their communication and collaboration tools and access to all of their documents in an intuitive interface, which helps make them more productive; we can extend the life of that system for another two years, which reduces our equipment expenditures.”

Uniform cross-platform interface helps reduce support issues, increase flexibility
Because the Lotus Notes 8 interface is the same across Linux and Windows, users generally need less training time and administrators can more quickly provide user support. “Lotus Notes and Domino 8 provides the same experience on either platform,” says Burt. “The support team doesn’t need to maintain a separate knowledge base for Linux users, which makes them more efficient. We also can move users from Windows to Linux without needing to retrain them on their basic productivity tools. It reduces user downtime after a move and makes our IT team much more efficient.”

Business productivity tools help simplify workflow
Users can work with and share documents without leaving the inclusive Lotus Notes 8 workspace—improving productivity by helping staff stay focused on the task at hand and allowing them to quickly share documents with colleagues. “When I receive a document, I don’t have to find another application to open it,” says Walicki. “I can edit it in context with my other Lotus Notes 8 tools available and easily gather feedback from the team.”

In addition, the Office of the CIO has implemented self-service capabilities for a number of collaborative services, with automatic charge-back mechanisms to the appropriate departments and divisions within IBM. Business users are now able to set up their own repositories, Web conferences and collaborative applications through a simple interface. The self-service capabilities help reduce administration costs, and the business can manage applications through policies that can help you meet governance and controls needs.

Integrated presence information helps users connect efficiently
Office of the CIO team members use the presence awareness indicator in Lotus Notes 8 to save time by moving interactions on the fly to the most efficient medium—from e-mail to instant messaging, for example—using the integrated, fully functional Lotus Sametime client. “E-mail is the killer application at IBM, but being able to see that the person who sent me an urgent question is online at the moment saves me an incredible amount of time,” says Walicki. “I can just click and start a chat in Sametime, and they get the information they need right away. It helps us move more quickly through projects and resolve situations where a single person can be a bottleneck for an entire process.”

The advanced collaboration features of Lotus Notes and Domino 8 help the IBM Office of the CIO team communicate more efficiently and effectively and improve productivity, as well as helping team members find ways to make the IBM workforce more productive. Walicki expects that the Lotus Notes and Domino 8 rollout will help the Office of the CIO with its role-based computing strategy, using Linux and other open standards like ODF to deliver targeted, cost-effective desktop and laptop configurations to IBM end users around the world. “One of the biggest challenges that we see today is how to enable collaboration across the entire company,” says Walicki. “Lotus Notes 8 helps IBM users be more productive as individuals, connect to our networks of colleagues and focus on business value, all of which makes IBM a better company.”

For more information
For more information about Lotus Notes and Domino, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/software/lotus


Key Components
Software
• IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8
• IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5.1
• IBM Lotus Symphony
• IBM Lotus Expeditor
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5