Bandwidth and Collaborative Services: Right Time, Right Place

Today, local phone companies throughout the United States are offering DSL communication services at incredibly low prices, and it's estimated that soon other broadband services will outstrip dial-in modem communication channels.

This inexpensive explosion in bandwidth technology is making collaborative services much more meaningful, allowing companies to create virtual environments where real collaboration can flourish.

Collaborative services are important because email just isn't enough anymore. Sharing documents, spreadsheets, charts, and other materials through email often requires extra steps that create interruptions in the flow of work. Even the simple act of picking up the telephone soon becomes a comparative obstacle to team-meeting productivity, while the long distance telephone charges alone quickly become quite expensive. And once the flow is broken, annoying problems of miscommunication quickly become apparent. Deadlines are missed, opportunities are wasted, and projects lose their momentum.

Where Are the Services?

Collaboration services are starting to address these problems by taking advantage of the increased communications bandwidth and by offering real-time chat, video, and document sharing so that individuals separated by long distances can pool their resources and maintain productive workflows.

But for some traditional iSeries customers, the idea of using an iSeries 400 as a collaboration server may seem like pushing the envelope pretty hard. "Collaboration," you may think, "is not what the iSeries was designed to do."

Think again! As users take up remote offices and as network bandwidth increases, the value of collaboration services--services that allow users to instant message, conference, whiteboard, voice or video chat, and share desktops--start to make sense on the iSeries. And the fact that Lotus' premier collaboration server, Lotus Sametime, runs efficiently on the iSeries should start to draw your attention.

Collaboration: Where It's Been, Where It's Going

It's easy to trace the value of collaboration systems in the business world: One needs only look at the success of email messaging. Instead of printing and faxing documents back and forth, we can attach a file to a message and send it around the globe. Combine email with instant messaging, and you've got the basis for open, unstructured collaboration.

Indeed, instant messaging--with the ability to "sense presence" of a fellow collaborator online and the capacity to send and receive audio/video between users--initially opened the door to collaborative systems and services. These systems run over a local network, the Internet, or an intranet to bring people together from both inside and outside the company.

Corporate Resistance to Collaborative Services

However, corporations have been slow to grasp the power of collaboration technology. First of all, the "free" services of AOL, Yahoo!, and The Microsoft Network have somewhat tarnished the genre. These services are viewed as "toys" by most corporate execs and are usually frowned upon by most CIOs.

Moreover, collaboration systems need to be much more than just messaging services if they are to be successful in a business setting. These systems must bring together a wide range of features and functionality. This includes email and group scheduling on top of a framework of presence awareness and advanced chat capabilities like one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many audio- and video-conferencing. "Structured" collaboration allows users to categorize, group, and track messages or documents or edits or tasks. It also allows users to view those steps of the collaborative process with integrated search facilities. "Real-time" collaboration systems provide the ability to share another user's application or work together on a digital whiteboard. Annotation tools are also very important when sharing objects to help keep track of users' revisions and modifications.

However, even this burgeoning slew of features still won't make a collaboration system enterprise-ready. The ultimate problem these systems are trying to solve is the real-time one-to-one and one-to-many collaboration on a single object. In a fully realized collaborative setting, team members need to be able to look at the same file, such as a word processing document or spreadsheet, make annotations and changes, and save the final version. And the most advanced systems must be designed to allow users to store multiple revisions, letting team members revisit older versions of the file.

Lotus Sametime: Ready for Primetime and Ready for iSeries

Of the half-dozen industrial-strength collaborative services packages available, Lotus Sametime has invariably led the competition. It competes in the market against WebDemo 1.3 from SpartaCom Technologies, Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server from Microsoft, eRoom 5.3 from eRoom Technology , and Click to Meet for Exchange 2.1 from First Virtual Communications. In evaluations conducted by Internet Week and other sources, Sametime is usually rated number 1 or 2 in features, functions, and stability. It runs atop the Lotus Domino engine, and as a result, benefits from Lotus' platform-independent architecture.
This brings us to why Sametime 2.5 on the iSeries has become so important. With native world-class collaborative functionality on the iSeries platform, Sametime can use the strength of the iSeries to greatly reduce the complexity of maintaining a collaborative services environment. Fortunately, however, this advantage doesn't cost more: IBM has priced Sametime for iSeries at the same price-point as Sametime for Windows.

Windows Versus iSeries: Sametime, Same Place?

IBM is quick to point out that the native iSeries implementation of Sametime is not a watered-down version of the Windows server edition. However, there are several minor differences between the Windows version and the iSeries version. The most significant difference is that Sametime must be installed on an existing Domino server on the iSeries. (Sametime on the Windows server platform is supported without a Domino server.) Also, there are some limitations in the use of whiteboards , and file attachments must be first processed by a free server utility in order to display graphics appropriately.

It is possible to run Sametime on the same Domino server that you use for email or other applications. However, IBM recommends that you consider creating a new Domino server partition. The new Domino server can reside on the same system as your existing Domino server, but, with separate server partitions, you can tune them individually for optimal performance.

So how are these services used in real life? Let's place Sametime back in the real-world.

Creative Collaboration: Sametime Rocks!

Our new sales and marketing exec was confronted with the need to create a marketing campaign without the physical availability of her primary personnel resources. How can she use Lotus Sametime to pull together her marketing team?

Using Sametime, the marketing manager can call a virtual meeting of her staff over the Internet. She can give her opening "getting to know me" presentation to a team that is dispersed to their regional locations, without putting anyone on a plane or a bus. She can lay out what needs to be accomplished by sharing Powerpoint presentations across the 'net. By using the voice conferencing features of Sametime, she can listen to the concerns of the burgeoning team as they take turns illustrating their points on a virtual white board. With a $100 video camera, she can even ensure that they see the serious expression on her face when she tells each of them what their responsibilities will be. She can do this from the home office, and instead of pulling remote team members into the central office for consultation at a great expense, she can apply that travel and hotel money toward the materials she needs for the marketing campaign itself. The entire initial gathering can be facilitated using the collaborative functions of Sametime, running on the iSeries 400.

But that's just the beginning. As the team splits up the various tasks of the new marketing campaign, it can continue to share information on an ad hoc basis throughout the entire process. Instant messaging, voice chat, white board, and file-sharing capabilities are designed to streamline the workflow until the project is complete. The team can assemble quickly on a daily basis, leaving expensive jaunts back to the home office for the most critical reasons.

Is It Worth the Expense?

Of course, collaborative facilities like Sametime can never substitute for the most critical face-to-face encounters. However, for daily interactions and exchanges, employees who are isolated from one another can reap huge benefits by being teamed with others through collaborative services such as Sametime. And as the team grows over time, the iSeries infrastructure is already in place to scale to the demand.

Finally, as collaborative service like Sametime are amortized over time, the cost of maintaining the infrastructure decreases. Consider that a fistful of airplane tickets and telephone bills will need to be paid at the end of any corporate meeting, while collaborative services pay for themselves cumulatively over the entire lifespan of the service.

For our new sales and marketing executive, the obstacles to creating her marketing campaign might have cost the company big bucks. But Lotus Sametime 2.5 on the iSeries could be just the ticket to transform those obstacles into real competitive success.

Thomas M. Stockwell is Editor in Chief of MCMagOnline. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..