Ok, I have to start with admitting that sometimes we at IBM are not excellent with naming products. But on the other hand we do listen to our customers and BPs and sometimes the miracle happens I guess I do not need to tell again the story about the names of Sametime and Quickplace, but this is a good example of what I mean.

I also admit that the Workplace branding is far from being very clear. As some comments in one of Ed's posts demonstrate, there is still a lot of confusion.

"could you possibly accept that most IBM Customers, even ones that attended Lotusphere, still don't understand the difference between Workplace the brand and Workplace the product/s? "IBM Workplace" is a brand and product family, and it includes Lotus Notes! You may get this, but the whole product and brand having the same name is flawed. Seriously I don't understand it, and I probably give it much more time than most to try and figure it out."

This post is another attempt to clarify the confusion. Let's see if I can make it in 4 lines.

IBM Workplace is a brand and includes several products, amongst which there is Notes/Domino. Not nice maybe, but IMHO not so hard to get as well.

We have then two "products" that bear the Workplace name, Workplace Collaboration Services (WCS) and Workplace Services Express (WSE).

WCS is a full featured collaborative platform based on J2EE (mail, IM, Web conferencing,Team Collaboration, Web Content Management, elearning,....).

WSE is a collaborative solution also J2EE based that includes IM and Team Collaboration only.

If you look at this picture you will see that is not just the Workplace "products" that have more than one representative in the "brand"; we have 2 different Domino servers as well. Does this create confusion ? I do not think so.

Now, let me just point out that we are not the only one that are playing with names. How many products in the Microsoft portfolio are branded "MS Office" ? I took this list from their website today:

Products:

Access
Excel
FrontPage
InfoPath
Live Meeting
Microsoft Office Live
OneNote
Outlook
PowerPoint
Project
Publisher
Small Business Accounting
Visio
Word
Servers:
Business Scorecard Manager
Live Communications Server
Project Server
SharePoint Portal Server
Windows SharePoint Services Technology
Microsoft Content Management Server
Microsoft Exchange Server

1. Charles Robinson03/03/2006 02:20:11 PM

I appreciate your effort and your diagram helps a little, but it is still not a clear picture of how all the pieces fit together. I spent three days during Lotusphere tracking down enough people who could fill in bits and pieces of Workplace before I finally had enough of an idea about how it all fits together. What I finally came up with is this:

Workplace Collaboration Services is a collection of Websphere Portal portlets. Websphere Portal is a set of J2EE components that requires Websphere Application Server. To create native Workplace Managed Client applications you use Rational Application Developer. [I'm still puzzled by Workplace Builder and Workplace Designer.] You can (or will be able to) launch Notes applications in Workplace Managed Client. This requires you have a Notes client installed and the WMC uses a plugin to surface the Notes client.

Does this create confusion? It does for me. I'm taking a wait and see approach, waiting for Hannover and ignoring Workplace. There are just way too many moving parts to try to piece together.

I don't mean this as an attack or a slam, I'm just trying to convey why people are confused about what Workplace is and how it fits together/beside Domino.

2. Richard Schwartz03/03/2006 04:14:28 PM
Homepage: http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz

Charles: Thanks for that. The positioning of Notes/Domino versus WCS/WMC is the key issue that really needs to be made ultra-clear. Here's how I prefer to think about it:

Notes/Domino is the proven enterprise-class solution for messaging and collaboration. It stands on its own, but can be integrated with just about anything.

WCS/WMD is a new technical approach to enterprise messaging and collaboration, with the primary objective of putting messaging and collaboration features under the same umbrella as all other applications an enterprise depends on; provided of course that the enterprise has chosen the Websphere-specific flavor of J2EE and IBM's DB2 database as the framework that provides their umbrella.

3. Ed Brill03/04/2006 08:43:36 AM
Homepage: http://www.edbrill.com

@2 WCS/WMC support other databases besides DB2. The WebSphere piece is accurate though.

4. Richard Schwartz03/04/2006 09:32:20 AM
Homepage: http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz

Thanks, Ed. That's great, and I had missed it.

5. Richard Schwartz03/04/2006 09:59:07 AM
Homepage: http://www.rhs.com/poweroftheschwartz

Further clarification:

See Supported databases listed here

The IBM Workplace collaboration products require one of the following databases running on a supported operating system listed above:

* IBM Cloudscape™ V5.1 ( Note: This database is installed by default and can be substituted with any of the other supported databases.)

* IBM DB2 Universal Database® Enterprise Server Edition V8.1 with Fix Pack 9a+

* IBM DB2 Universal Database Workgroup Server Edition V8.1 with Fix Pack 9a

* DB2® for iSeries V5R3

* Oracle Enterprise Edition 9i Release 2 (9.2.0.4)

* Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise 2000 Service Pack 3a

6. burun estetigi05/01/2008 09:33:51 AM
Homepage: http://www.estetik-merkezleri.com

nice blogs.

7. Estetik07/20/2008 03:24:31 PM
Homepage: http://www.teomandogan.com

thank you very good