IBM Workplace is a discontinued brand ofcollaborative software applications fromIBM'sLotus Software division. It was intended to be the next generation of collaboration software that would work with IBM'sJava EE-basedWebSphere Portal server software. Introduced in 2003, the brand was largely disbanded by 2007, with its core technologies and many of its products rebranded as Lotus orWebSphere.
In 2002 atLotusphere, IBM's annual conference for Lotus customers, IBM's Lotus division announced its Java EE-based "NextGen" initiative.[1] This became the Workplace brand, which IBM first introduced atLotusphere 2003. The first Workplace product is Workplace Messaging, a lightweight e-mail solution.[2] More Workplace applications were introduced later, such as instant messaging and document management.[3] In 2004, Workplace 2.0 was released, to run inside of a desktoprich client and in a web browser.
Because the goal of Workplace largely overlapped IBM's existingLotus Notes andDomino software, Notes and Domino customers became increasingly worried that Notes and Domino would either be discontinued or at best marginalized in favor of Workplace.[4] To assuage this fear, IBM demonstrated in 2005 plans for integrating Workplace products with Notes and Domino products.[5] IBM also started to include Lotus Notes and Domino within the "Workplace family".[6]
However, by 2007, most Workplace-branded products were being either discontinued (such as Workplace Messaging)[7] or rebranded as Lotus or WebSphere. Mike Rhodin, general manager of Lotus Software, said that Workplace was a way to shake up the Lotus team into creating innovative technologies, and now that technologies had been created, they were being folded back into the core brands. Lotus also heard that having the Workplace brand in addition to its other brands was confusing.[8]
IBM Workplace Client Technology is a defunctapplication platform built on top of theEclipseRich Client Platform (RCP) 3.0, which itself is written inJava. It provides tools to manage rich clients, such as synchronization so that clients can work with data offline, and provisioning so that servers can automatically push down the latest version of applications onto clients.
Workplace Client Technology has evolved intoIBM Lotus Expeditor.
IBM Workplace Collaboration Services is a single product providing a set of communication andcollaboration tools such ase-mail, calendaring and scheduling, awareness,instant messaging,e-learning, team spaces,Web conferencing, and document and Webcontent management.
IBM ended support for Workplace Collaboration Services on September 30, 2009.[9] It has been superseded largely by Lotus-branded products, such asNotes,Domino,Sametime, Quickr, andConnections.
IBM Workplace Managed Client is a server-managed rich client for IBM Workplace Collaboration Services. It has offline support for email, calendaring, scheduling, and document management. It has a plug-in for running Lotus Notes 7 applications, and a set of productivity tools for office documents, forked fromOpenOffice.org 1.1.4 (the last version released under theSun Industry Standards Source License).[10] Version 2.6 was released January 23, 2006.[11]
Workplace Managed Client introduced a collaboration tool called Activity Explorer. It let teams of users manage projects via an object hierarchy, which groups together information objects (such as files, messages, and web links) that are related to an ongoing project and are shared among team members.
Workplace Managed Client is no longer being actively marketed. It was superseded byLotus Notes,Domino andSymphony. Activity Explorer functionality is now part ofIBM Lotus Connections.
IBM Workplace Forms is a suite of products for developing and delivering data-driven, XML-based electronic forms to end-users. The product is now known asIBM Lotus Forms.
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