Integrated task workspaces

Most organizations have team workers that make repeated use of a number of applications and services and communicate heavily with other team members. By grouping their tools on a single screen, significant gains in productivity and convenience can be made.

IBM Lotus Notes is part of a development platform for workflow applications and it now provides support for composite applications, which enables developers to combine their existing Lotus Notes applications with line-of-business application components, to solve specific business problems. Portals today combine components from multiple applications into a single, role-based work environment. A composite application for a sales team might combine a standard Lotus Notes collaboration application with components from sales force automation, customer relationship management (CRM) and an order-entry application.

Another kind of IBM workspace is activity-centric collaboration, which lets users organize, navigate, manage and share information-emails, calendar entries, documents, e-meetings-around a particular activity or project. "If you're working in a project team today, you probably manage the activities mainly through your email inbox, which can get confusing and difficult," said Lee, "Activity-centric collaboration let's you group together and manage all the varied information affiliated with a project, including e-mail threads, chat logs, documents, meeting minutes, web content, voice messages. It's a simpler and more natural way to work."

IBM's Websphere Portal provides a single point of personalized interaction with applications, content, processes and people, presented side-by-side through a GUI. Each user may have several roles, served by screens for productivity aids, customer support, and corporate information. Portals can be on an intranet for internal use, or outside the firewall supporting B2B and B2C collaboration.