VCU unifies and enriches its messaging and collaboration environment with IBM Lotus technology

Sometimes patience pays off. That’s a stance well understood by Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), which has been steadily building its collaborative environment over a number of years.

With roots going back to the early 1800s, VCU is today the largest university in Virginia. Ranked among the top 100 universities in the United States in sponsored research, the offerings of its 15 separate schools span the sciences and humanities, engineering, social work, business, the arts and a full range of health sciences programs. With two main campuses in downtown Richmond, Virginia, as well as satellite operations in several locations in the Commonwealth and in Doha, Qatar, e-mail and other collaboration technologies play a major role at VCU by bringing people together and providing channels for their interactions.

E-mail challenges led to a wise early choice
VCU became one of the early adopters of Lotus Notes back in 1996 when it was the first integrated platform for messaging and collaboration in the market. Like many universities when e-mail was new and just gaining ground, VCU had multiple e-mail systems in operation because its organizational units had autonomy to select whatever tools they wanted to use. Three or four e-mail systems were being run by central IT units, with a half dozen others being run by various schools and departments.

Many of these were home-grown systems that were cobbled together, and the functionality was quite basic—they worked, but didn’t work very well. The segmented communications infrastructure also spawned many IT issues. Interoperability and directory services presented huge problems. It was difficult for IT to manage mail transfers between systems and changes of e-mail address. It was difficult for users to know who was on which e-mail account and to find people’s e-mail addresses, especially for colleagues in different schools or departments. Further, when sending an e-mail from one system to another, one never knew if it would actually be delivered, or how long that might take.

The University felt it needed a full-featured, enterprise-class messaging system that could be extended uniformly to its whole population of faculty, staff and students. To facilitate meetings, it needed a built-in calendaring function that could enable group scheduling across all University units and e-mail systems. For research and other collaborative efforts, it needed shared services and databases. At that time, information security was starting to become a concern among universities; when the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted in 1996, VCU increased its focus on security requirements because its health sciences and clinical programs involved patient data.

VCU chose IBM Lotus Notes for its messaging system because as a platform for integrated communication and collaboration, it offered much more than just messaging. With its advanced group calendaring and scheduling functions and its strong security protections, it provided a feature set that took it well beyond just e-mail. The University has remained a steady Lotus Notes and Domino customer since 1996, and over the years, it acquired Lotus QuickPlace and Lotus Quickr for team collaboration and Lotus Sametime for instant messaging.

Standardizing has taken time but been worth the wait
Until the mid-1990s, e-mail was somewhat of a niche tool for a segment of intrepid users. But about the time VCU first acquired Lotus Notes, use of e-mail began to flow upward in the organization. Deans, vice presidents and the University president started using e-mail and began to depend on it for communications. Their example held sway. The database, document management and team workspace capabilities that came along with subsequent releases of Lotus Notes were taken up by academic units that used them to collaborate, bringing more users on board. Other users who were reluctant to leave their familiar Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) e-mail clients for the Lotus Notes client were able to stay with the IMAP clients, maintaining this comfort level, while still enjoying the benefits of the Lotus Domino enterprise e-mail service.

Standardizing the entire University on Lotus Notes and Domino has been a long, incremental process. During the years it took to integrate and retire all the old systems, however, user adoption of Lotus Notes and Domino has increased steadily. Today, all VCU users in the United States are on Lotus Notes and Domino, with users at VCU’s Middle East campus in Doha, Qatar to be brought on board in 2009.

With a standardized Lotus Notes and Domino messaging infrastructure in place, VCU is seeing improvement on many fronts. There is now just one system for IT to support, freeing up IT staff to work on other projects and helping to eliminate problems stemming from system incompatibilities. There is a centralized directory and naming structure, and the “address ahead” feature of Lotus Notes automatically calls up the correct addresses for intended e-mail recipients, saving users both time and frustration. There is one standard interface that everybody knows and uses. And the system has been able to scale up seamlessly to accommodate increasingly larger numbers of users.

All students have been given Lotus Domino Web Access as their mail client. Because most students are familiar with Web browsers, providing them with Lotus Domino Web Access eliminates the need for training and reduces the number of Lotus Notes clients to be managed. Approximately 400 staff and faculty users can get their e-mail through BlackBerry devices, including international travelers who work on University activities in countries worldwide. VCU has also deployed Lotus Notes Traveler, client software that allows Microsoft Windows–based mobile phones and PDAs to interact with a Lotus Domino server. This means e-mails can be received and displayed by cell phones and PDAs, as well as computers. Users can also access their mail through the increasingly popular iPhone.

“Killer app” introduces users to workflow
VCU has made good use of the Lotus Domino application development framework. It created a “killer app” for leave requests early on to introduce users to the concept of workflow and show them what Lotus Notes could do beyond e-mail. An e-mail–enabled workflow, the Leave Request application allows staff members to submit leave requests to their supervisors online. Both submitter and supervisor get a notification when the request has been sent, with a link for the supervisor that can be opened via either Lotus Notes or a Web browser, enabling them to simply approve or deny the leave.

The popular application has been in constant use since its inception. Marie Scott, the director of e-mail services for VCU, explains the impact this application originally had: “When you try to explain workflow in technical terms to people, you just see their eyes glaze over. But when you talk about something that’s near and dear to their heart, like submitting a leave request and having their supervisor accept and approve it within a matter of minutes—that gets their attention!”

The application also provides the timekeepers responsible for submitting leave totals at the end of pay periods with a summary view they can use instead of going through many little sheets of paper to tabulate leave requests. For some of the larger departments, this took several hours each pay period. Now the timekeepers have an automatically tabulated view from which they can key in the leave totals. Supervisors have a view that lets them see all their employees’ leave requests in one place, making it easier to manage leave schedules. And employees get responses to their leave requests right away. Based on the success of this application, VCU has developed a number of other Lotus Domino–based collaborative applications.

Lotus QuickPlace supports four-year, multi-million dollar project
VCU used Lotus QuickPlace—and more recently, Lotus Quickr—to support two very large-scale group projects and a host of smaller ones. The first large project involved replacing some older systems for human resources (HR), finance and student administration with a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This project lasted four years, cost US$11 million and involved hundreds of participants.

Project team members and other contributors included people from IT, the central administrative offices, HR, finance, enrollment services and the top administrative staff in the schools and departments that would use the new systems. Eventually, the project also pulled in users from general staff, faculty and students, because the ERP system has a Web-based self-service feature for accessing information about HR, payroll, enrollment, registration and classes. A core team of 40 to 50 people worked steadily on this project, with ancillary staff brought in at various points along the way.

The Lotus QuickPlace environment served as the central repository for team and project information, planning documents, communications and technical and project documentation. According to Mark D. Willis, CIO of VCU, “Having this central communications hub was very valuable. Everybody had simple access to this repository where they could keep abreast of projects status, communicate with others, check documents out and then go back in again with changes. There was never any question about who had the most current version of what because everything was stored and organized centrally.”

Scott notes that collaboration with internal and external team members was a valuable piece of the project. “The other very useful thing was that team members representing various participating vendors were able to join this shared space, too, even though they weren’t on the VCU mail system and didn’t have Lotus Domino accounts or enterprise IDs within VCU’s corporate LDAP,” she says.

Emergency Preparedness Plan relies on Lotus Quickr and Lotus Notes
In 2008, VCU began replacing Lotus QuickPlace with its product successor, Lotus Quickr. Lotus Quickr is a Web-based tool that provides more advanced document management capabilities and other enhancements. It plays a key role in a second high-profile project: emergency preparedness.

Emergency preparedness had been an ongoing focus for the University, but VCU got very serious about its plans after 9/11 and has created a structured process in which each unit must develop an Emergency Preparedness Plan (EPP) appropriate to its particular activities. For example, the student housing unit has a plan, dining services has its own plan, etc. These plans roll up to larger unit and University plans.

A Lotus Quickr space serves as the central repository for the EPP documents, providing a single resource that is easy to find and access quickly via the Web. The EPP documents can be viewed by any registered user, so people from different units can share and learn from each other’s plans. Document management capabilities provide version control, helping to ensure that users are always looking at the most recent plan updates. When an emergency occurs, any user with Internet access can get into these documents online. (Paper copies of the documents are also stored in strategic locations.)

The University plans, prepares and tests for all aspects of various kinds of emergencies, from a terrorist attack on facilities or individuals to a chemical spill, explosion, major fire or major weather event. An incident response team is convened for actual emergencies; for example, several years ago when two hurricanes came through Richmond, the incident response team came together to manage the preparation, the crisis itself and the aftermath.

Like large businesses, universities must also determine the best way to communicate urgent information quickly to a large population in the case of an emergency. While some have explored text messaging as an immediate communication method, Willis notes that there are some caveats involved. “In talking to my colleagues around the state, when they tested broadcasting text messages to large populations, it would sometimes take hours for them to be delivered to everyone,” he says. “That’s because this is an add-on service for the telecommunications companies, and these messages can get hung up on the internal servers and communication lines of the phone carriers for literally hours at a time.”

VCU found that e-mail was its fastest means of large scale communication in an emergency. According to Willis, “With our single, unified Lotus Notes system, we can get 50,000 e-mails out to everybody within just three to four minutes. What other schools with mixed mail environments took hours to do was, for us, almost instantaneous.” In addition to e-mail, VCU has adopted a multi-pronged emergency communication strategy that includes text messaging, digital signs across campus, sirens, emergency alert beacons in classrooms and a pop-up desk messenger for broadcasting alerts.

Unified communication and collaboration is underway
Lotus Sametime instant messaging is available at VCU, and its user base continues to grow. Emergency response team members use it to communicate, students use it to reach faculty members and many University staff use Sametime instead of e-mail for instant communication. IT is using the screen-sharing capability built into Lotus Sametime to see and take control of the workstations of users seeking technical help.

VCU is also pursuing a Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC2) environment using Lotus Sametime as the platform. Recently, the University implemented Voice over IP (VoIP) phones using Avaya products, with IBM as the integrator and prime contractor. The next project will be to integrate voice, e-mail and other communication services; the building blocks for this integrated infrastructure are already in place and in test mode.

Staying current and looking back
VCU upgraded to Lotus Notes and Domino 8 in May of 2008, rolling it out to all users except the faculty, who will receive it in 2009. One of the most appreciated new attributes on the server side is the database compression, which so far has resulted in 30 percent storage savings.

On the user side, students were migrated first to take advantage of Lotus Domino Web Access (now called Lotus iNotes) with its “Lite” mode—a lightweight interface for low-bandwidth situations. Often students are working at kiosks or traveling to workstations they don’t own, so they don’t want to download ActiveX Controls. With Lotus iNotes, when students first came on board in the fall, there was a drastic reduction in help desk calls regarding browser set-up questions—an added bonus.

Looking back, Willis is pleased with VCU’s original decision to select Lotus Notes for its enterprise-wide messaging system and to stay with it over the years. “In 1996 we knew we wanted more than just an e-mail system. We wanted a platform for collaboration. Lotus Notes was the package that gave us that and continues to do so now,” he says.

The rich feature set, the platform stability and security and the backward compatibility of Lotus Notes have all been important, and the ability of Lotus Domino to interface with multiple client types was critical in helping the university standardize on a single messaging system. “If we had told all our 50,000 users that there was only one client they could use, we would have had mass rebellion,” says Willis. “But allowing people to use the interface they were comfortable with to access an integrated and centrally managed back end—that was a win-win for everyone.”

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