Presentation detailing the requirements for a collaborative organisation, how to become one, what technologies will help, and how to deliver these using Lotus software. Presented to UK Corporate IT forum at IBM Bedfont, 10 Feb 2009

1. Building a Collaborative Infrastructure
Stuart McIntyre
Collaboration Matters Limited
stuart@collaborationmatters.com
http://collaborationmatters.com
http://collaboratewith.me
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2. Agenda
• What is Collaboration?
• What is a Collaborative Organisation?
• What technologies elements are needed?
• What Lotus software might you need?
• A look at deployment scenarios
• What will be the hurdles to overcome?
• Summary
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3. About me
• Technical Director of Collaboration Matters Limited
• Social Software Evangelist
• Blogger (quickrblog.com, lotusconnectionsblog.com etc)
• Connections/Quickr deployment specialist
• Tweeter (stuartmcintyre) - are you really not on Twitter yet? ;-)
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4. What is Collaboration?
• Collaboration is:
• a recursive process where two or more people or organisations work
together toward an intersection of common goals — for example, an
intellectual endeavour that is creative in nature—by sharing
knowledge, learning and building consensus.
• Collaboration does not require leadership and can sometimes bring
better results through decentralization and egalitarianism. In particular,
teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater resources,
recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration
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5. What makes a Collaborative Organisation?
• A collaborative organization is one that has the following characteristics:
1.The values and objectives of employees and management are aligned,
2.A climate of mutual trust and respect exists,
3.The knowledge of all the staff, customers and suppliers is shared and
pooled to optimize the organisation's operations and opportunities,
4.Decision making is more decentralised than it is in most current
organisations and more stakeholders in the organisation play a role in
defining the direction in which the organization moves, and
5.Hierarchical structures are kept to a minimum. The company is managed
democratically by consensus rather than by command and control.
From http://www2.physics.utoronto.ca/~logan/cqchin.doc
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6. What makes a Collaborative Organisation?
• A collaborative organization is one that has the following characteristics:
1.The values and objectives of employees and management are aligned,
2.A climate of mutual trust and respect exists,
3.The knowledge of all the staff, customers and suppliers is shared and
pooled to optimize the organisation's operations and opportunities,
4.Decision making is more decentralised than it is in most current
organisations and more stakeholders in the organisation play a role in
defining the direction in which the organization moves, and
5.Hierarchical structures are kept to a minimum. The company is
managed democratically by consensus rather than by command and
control.
From http://www2.physics.utoronto.ca/~logan/cqchin.doc
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7. What will be the key technologies required?
• First, technology is not the solution - it is part of the solution
• Must be embraced by cultural change, by business leadership and by user
education (not technical training)
• However, some technology will help:
• Social Profiles
• Communities of Practice
• Ideas Sharing & Innovation Management
• Collaboration ‘Places’
• Presence Awareness
• Persistent Conversations
• We’ll look at how they can be implemented in your organisation...
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8. Where do those technologies sit?
Social Profiles - Lotus Connections Profiles
Communities of Practice - Lotus Connections Communities
Ideas Sharing & Innovation Management - Lotus Connections Blogs,
Activities and Lotus Quickr Team Places (+ IdeaJam?)
Collaboration ‘Places’ - Lotus Quickr Team Places, ‘QuickrShare’,
Lotus Connections Activities
Presence Awareness - Lotus Sametime
Persistent Conversations - Lotus Sametime Advanced
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9. Shall we take a look?
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10. Lotus Connections
• Lotus Connections is social software for business that empowers you to be
more effective and innovative by building dynamic networks of coworkers,
partners, and customers Activities
Homepage
Profiles
Communities Dogear
Blogs
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11. Lotus Connections has 6 services …
HomePage
Keep up with changes in your own social network. Delivers aggregate view of all Connections services and
provides cross-service search.
Profiles
Quickly find the people you need by searching across your organization using keywords that help identify
expertise, current projects and responsibilities.
Communities
Create, find and join communities of people who share a common interest, responsibility, or area of
expertise.
Blogs
Use a weblog to present your point of view and get feedback from others; read what others are saying.
Dogear
Save, organize and share bookmarks to valued online resources, discover bookmarks that have been
shared by others.
Activities
Organise your work, plan next steps, and collaborate easily with others to execute on your everyday
deliverables.
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12. Social Profiles
• So much more than “employee
whitepages”
• Tap into the knowledge capital
within your organisation
• Expand your personal network
- develop and maintain
personal relationships that
span obstacles like reporting
structure, department,
geography, etc.
• Profiles typically include a
person's photo, reporting
structure, name, pronunciation,
the time zone the person works
in, and information about the
individual's expertise and areas
of interest.
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13. Surfacing Social Profiles
• Power of Social Profiles is seen when surfaced throughout your organisation -
always available ‘person card’, building context of where and why this
individual is important
• Intranet/Extranet/Internet
• Email (Lotus Notes/Outlook)
• IM (Sametime)
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14. Beyond the Business Card
• Connections Profiles and ‘Person Card’ can be:
• Customised - include/exclude any of the default fields (Floor, Building etc),
add an almost unlimited number of custom fields (HR ID, Region etc)
• Extended - can link to other applications, systems
• Typed - can use multiple ‘Profile Types’ to display different information for
user groups (teachers/students, full-time/part-time etc.)
• Social - links to colleagues, to blogs, wikis, recent activities etc.
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15. Communities of Practice
communities of practice - an
environment connecting people and
encouraging the sharing of ideas
and experiences
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/stephendale/cop-conversations-to-collaboration-presentation
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16. What is a Community of Practice
• A Community of Practice is a network of individuals with common problems
or interests who get together to explore ways of working, identify common
solutions, and share good practice and ideas.
• puts you in touch with like-minded colleagues and peers
• allows you to share your experiences and learn from others
• allows you to collaborate and achieve common outcomes
• accelerates your learning
• validates and builds on existing knowledge and good practice
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17. Why Communities of Practice?
Communities of Practice are not about bringing knowledge into the
organisation but about helping to grow the knowledge that we need
internally within our organisations.
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18. Communities
• Communities helps people who share a
common interest to collaborate by
exchanging and sharing information or
interacting with one another via their Web
browser, IBM Lotus Sametime, and email
software.
• Community bookmarks and Activities
• Discussion Forums
• Integration with supported wikis
• Integration with Lotus Sametime Advanced
(chat with other members and save chat
transcripts in the community's discussion
forum & send a broadcast message to a
community when they need a quick answer)
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19. Some Community Types
• Helping Communities provide a forum for community members to help each
other with everyday work needs.
• Best Practice Communities develop and disseminate best practices,
guidelines, and procedures for their members use.
• Knowledge Stewarding Communities organise, manage, and steward a
body of knowledge from which community members can draw.
• Innovation Communities create breakthrough ideas, new knowledge, and
new practices.
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20. Ideas Sharing & Innovation Management
• Working smarter together
• Generation and publication of ideas via blog posts
and development via comments and discussions
• It’s about creating a stronger, more participatory business culture that fosters
quick thinking and new ideas -> Web 2.0 technologies
• Mashups enable users to create situational applications that solve business
problems as they come up.
• Integration of innovation management tools via widgets
and plug-ins - e.g. IdeaJam.
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21. Collaboration ‘Places’
• Areas where users can collaborate on:
• documents
• events
• tasks
• projects
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22. What is ?
•Mergers & Acquisitions
•Innovation Place
and ... subscribing to key sites to keep a
“finger on the pulse”
Finance / Accounting Sales Human Resources Marketing R&D
•Competitive •Employee •New Content •Project mgmt.
•Budget •R&D Place
“Win room” benefits tracking
Planning •RFP response •New employee •Best Practices
•Product launch
•Annual report •Event planning resource center •Budget
preparation planning
•Bid •Competition
management room
•Shared sites
with vendors
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23. Quickr Services and Templates
Libraries
Quickly manage documents, forms, images, or other media in content libraries that you can manage and
share with others.
Team Discussions / Forums
Keep a journal or blog of your meetings or creating discussions on different topics effecting your team.
WIKIs (Shared Editable Pages)
A shared editing space that team members can use to create and manage content such as designs,
presentations, or other group material.
Team Calendar
Manage a community view of important events and activities that effect your team.
Lists
Lists are simple “databases” of information such as tasks, vacation days, team members, … that can be
used to manage information simply and quickly.
RSS / ATOM Feeds
Quickr provides the ability to integrate and render feeds from your favorite ATOM or RSS site as well as to
produce a feed into your favorite feed reader.
… Templates can be customized and extended
… and its easy to add new ones
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24. Work from your favorite applications
Web Browser Windows Explorer /
“My Documents”
Lotus Sametime
Lotus Notes client
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Office / IBM Symphony
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25. Presence Awareness
• Extends the power of presence to online applications, e.g. Quickr and
Connections
• Important aspect of ‘Person Card’ and within Connections Profiles
• Key element in building trust between individuals, especially across
organisational or geographic boundaries. Helps to flatten hierarchical
structures by allowing connections directly between managers and staff.
• Click to chat and click to talk from within the context of business and social
applications
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26. Persistent Conversations
• Keep a continuous discussion running on a specific topic with an interested
community of people — in the atmosphere of an informal conversation.
• Monitor the chat rooms to which you have subscribed, see how many people/
unread messages are in each, the number of unread messages or the number of
active participants.
• Keep yourself in the loop with alerts so you'll be notified when a group is discussing
keywords in which you're interested.
• Chat history makes it easy for you to get caught
up with what the group has been discussing if
you've been away.
• Save a transcript of the discussion so that
others can search for and see what you were
discussing, your group's insight and expertise.
• Save into Lotus Connections Communities
• Part of Lotus Sametime Advanced
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27. That’s the technology...
... how do I make it work?
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28. Lotus Connections Functional Topology
Lotus Connections Service
Corporate LDAP Directory
IBM WebSphere Application Server
IBM Tivoli Directory Server 6
6.1 ® (including IBM HTTP Server)
IBM Lotus Domino 7.0.2 +
running on
Microsoft Active Directory 2003
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES v4 ®
Sun Java™ System Directory Server 5.2®
Windows® 2003 Server®
Novell eDirectory 8.8
(Standard or Enterprise)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 ®
AIX 5.3.0.4 and later
Browser
Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6.0 + One or more
Mozilla Firefox 2.0+ on Windows, Linux, & Mac services…
IBM WebSphere Portal Homepage
Rich Clients Activities
IBM Lotus Notes Profiles
IBM Lotus Sametime RDMS
Dogear
Microsoft Office plug-ins IBM DB2 9.1 ® FP4
Blogs
Feed support Oracle 10g ®
Communities
Atom based Readers MS SQL Server
Custom Applications 2005 Enterprise
Web and Rich Clients Edition ®
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29. Lotus Connections Self-Contained Pilot
• Supports only Windows 2003.
• Installation installs WAS 6.1.0.13 and DB2 Express.
• No LDAP is installed, and no integration with existing LDAP.
• Registered users are imported into the Self Contained Pilot via a text file.
• Maximum of 100 concurrent / 1000 registered users.
• Support for migrating data from this pilot to a production deployment.
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30. Small System/Pilot Deployment
• Appropriate for deployment to workgroup, small business, small deployment
(to ~1,000 users)
• Add discrete HTTP Server for additional scalability (to ~3,000 users)
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31. Clustered System
• Appropriate for enterprise deployments (~3,000+ users)
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32. Some Connections deployment tips
• Ensure that OS patch level meet minimum requirements for:
• Application Server
• Database Server
• IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator
• LDAP Server
• (Check and check again!)
• Use DB2 as the RDBMS if possible. Oracle and SQL Server are supported, but DB2
much easier to diagnose problems and resolve issues - think “Black Box”
• Both Domino and Active Directory work well as LDAP. Choose a globally unique
identifier you can maintain (usually uid on Domino, sAMAccountName on AD). Must
be single valued, unique and non-mutable.
• For large environments (> ~3,000 users) clustering/load balancing will be required,
but don’t let that put you off. Start small for Pilot purposes and scale from there.
• If your organisation already has RDBMS and/or J2EE/Websphere skills, embrace
them early - they can really help from day 1. But don’t panic - it can be thought of
as just one Lotus product.
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33. Some Connections deployment tips
• Don’t assume you need to deploy (or launch) all Connections features immediately.
If finding people is your main concern, install all the features but only enable
Profiles. Then bring the other features on-stream later.
• Pre-load as many of the Profile fields as possible, including photos & add custom
fields to suit your organisational need. Do this BEFORE loading pilot/production
users
• Integrate Connections data into your other applications/environments ASAP -
particularly Notes and Sametime.
• ‘Educate’ your users - don’t just ‘train’ them in how to use the Connections tools.
Instead, inform them why social software can help, how to use the features to
improve the organisation’s information sharing. Explain tagging and why that’s
important.
• Give the users some tasks/projects that must be completed in Connections
(especially Activities) to get them involved.
• Reward those that embrace the technology best and evangelise to others in the
organisation.
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34. Lotus Quickr
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35. Quickr Topology (using Domino Services)
Dispatcher
Deployment
HTTP server HTTP server
Manager
Lotus Quickr 8.1 on
Lotus Domino Lotus Connections
Domino
Domino 7.0/8.0 WAS 6.1
Directory server
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36. Quickr Topology (using J2EE services)
Dispatcher
HTTP server HTTP server
Deployment Deployment Deployment
Manager Manager Manager
Lotus Quickr 8.1 on
WebSphere Portal 5.1 or 6.x Lotus Connections
Portal 6.0.1.1
WAS 5.x or 6.x WAS 6.0.2.17 WAS 6.1
Directory server Database server
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37. Lotus Quickr ECM Integration
• Fills a big gap around Basic content and collaboration services in your ECM
infrastructure
• Leverage the Simple & Intuitive Lotus Quickr Web 2.0 UI (often easier than existing
many ECM UIs)
• Single set of connectors that access both Lotus Quickr and ECM back-ends
(simplifying use and reducing costs)
• Leverages an open standards (promotes easy integration and extensibility)
• Works with your existing infrastructure
• Unlike some competitors, we don’t force upgrades to desktop OS, desktop
productivity tools, server OS, database, or directory
• Integrates tightly with Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime
• When paired with IBM’s Content Manager or FileNet, provides the most complete
single-vendor end-to-end content management solution in the industry
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38. Lotus Quickr 8.1.1: Lotus Connections Integration
• Add a wiki or team place to a community
• Membership integration between a community and its linked wikis and/or
team places
• New feeds to show wiki updates on the community's home page
• New links on a community's home page to open the wiki or team place
• New links in a team place or wiki to open the community's home page
• Add a Lotus Quickr document library to a Lotus Connections activity
• Publish a document from an activity into a Lotus Quickr document library
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39. Some Quickr deployment tips
• Typically most large organisations will look to deploy J2EE version - unless they
already have significant investment in Quickplace
• Quickr/J2EE uses same component parts as Connections, integrates well and the
two products are coming even closer in Connections 2.5 & Quickr 9
• Quickr ECM integration is a must-have for any organisations using Filenet or
Content Manager - brings those products into the Collaborative Organisation
• Start with a number of key projects and use Quickr Team Places to help manage
them - integrate Connections Activities (if available) to manage the sub-tasks
• Theme the Places from day one to match your organisation’s standards - make it
easy for users to adopt
• Deploy the plug-ins - particularly as part of your Notes 8.x and Sametime 8.x roll-
outs. However, watch for version compatibility - can be tricky. Mac/Linux
connectors to come later
• Integrate Sametime - the presence awareness immediately adds value
• Use Quickr Wikis carefully - great in J2EE, less so in Domino, new Wiki functionality
coming in Quickr 8.2
• If using Domino release, use SNAPPS templates!
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40. Lotus Sametime
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41. Lotus Sametime: IBM's UC2 Software Platform
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42. Lotus Sametime Advanced - Topology
• Don’t panic - the same WAS, DB and LDAP components as in Connections
and Quickr/J2EE
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43. Lotus Sametime Community Integration
Remote
Workers
Sametime Clients
Integrate with
server and
Extensive
gateway
customizable
clients
Management
Sametime Server
Sametime Gateway
Federated
Businesses
Integrate with
Databases
Enterprise
Presence, Rules, Conferencing, applications
Text, Data, Audio, Video
Integrate
SIP Quickr Connections Notes/Domino
with PBX
PBX Network
systems
LDAP Directory
PSTN and
Mobile Phones
Unified Access Social Unified
SIP/PSTN
Telephony Resources Software Messaging
Gateway
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44. Some Sametime deployment tips
• Firstly, if not using Sametime in your environment today, why not?! No extra
cost for Sametime Entry if under Notes/Domino maintenance
• Feeling the economic squeeze? Sametime Standard/Advanced ROI is very
easy to demonstrate - reduction in calls (IM), reduction in travel (Web
Conferencing) and improvement in speed of access to individuals (IM)
• Web conferencing and VOIP in Sametime is great over LAN, and does work
over WAN links, but careful management is required (QoS VPN links for
example). Cross-platform web conferences can be problematic. Should be
much improved in Sametime 8.5!
• Step up in architecture for Sametime Advanced is worth it - persistent chat
and broadcasts are massive features
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45. What do you need to do?
• People-centric to Community-centric Collaboration
• People Centric = One to One
• Communities = One to Many, Many to One
• Ability to capture tacit knowledge
• Leverage unstructured data
• Benefit from user generated content
• Ad hoc collaboration
Reference: Muller et al: Return on Contribution: measuring the Benefits from Enterprise
Social Software
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46. What will be the hurdles?
• Adoption
• WebSphere/RDBMS/MQ skills
• Cost/ROI
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47. Adoption in the Enterprise
• Not a new problem (ref. Lotus Notes, circa 1990)
• Today - Viral Effort - Consumer-driven
• Benefits include:
• Greater agility
• Accelerates development cycles
• Sales team enablement
• Enabling collaborative business processes
• Human to human sharing of knowledge
• “Before implementing a community platform, over 3% of a company's daily
internet traffic was to sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace”
Reported at the Office2.0 conference (Sept 2008)
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48. ummary
• Social and Collaboration software helps to 'flatten the grid' and encourage
participation from all directions
• Helps the best ideas emerge
• Improves transparency
• Drives innovation
• The infrastructure can be daunting compared to traditional Lotus
environments, but it doesn’t need to be.
• It's here to stay!
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