210 Part II • Applying Information Technology
support real-time collaboration is presence awareness, or the
ability to detect others’ online availability (which is the key
technology underlying IM). None of the leading groupware
packages provide all the functions that a company might
want, but in many cases add-on packages can be purchased
to fill the gaps.
One might guess that the heart of a successful general-
purpose groupware product is electronic mail, and that is
certainly right—both industry leader Microsoft Exchange^2
and top contender Lotus Notes^3 (from IBM) have excellent
e-mail capabilities. Until 2004, Lotus Notes held the top
position based largely on its outstanding ability to share
documents of all types. Lotus Notes is still used in more
than half of the Fortune 100 companies, with 145 million
corporate employees using Notes (Boulton, 2009).
However, for a variety of reasons—Exchange is somewhat
less expensive to operate, Exchange has a user interface
that some find easier to use, and Microsoft’s marketing
prowess—Exchange has passed Notes in terms of its
installed base. In terms of market share, no other
contenders come close to the top two. However, there are
other players in the market with exciting groupware prod-
ucts, including Oracle Beehive Collaboration Software,
Novell GroupWise, HotOffice, Webcrossing Community
(from Bayspire, Inc.), and EMC’s Documentum eRoom.
The top two players have added additional products
to supplement the collaboration capabilities built into their
baseline groupware products. Microsoft offers Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server, an integrated suite of server
capabilities including extensive collaboration services
such as shared workspaces, shared calendars, presence
awareness and IM, document management, workflow
routing, wikis, and blogs. Then Microsoft Office
Communications Server—this is Microsoft’s primary UC
offering—delivers streamlined communications including
presence awareness and IM, VoIP telephony, voice and
videoconferencing, and mobile access. We should also
note that Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint
are available as hosted (SaaS) services.
IBM Lotus Sametime—IBM’s primary UC
offering—provides integrated, real-time communications
services including presence awareness and IM, voice and
video conferencing, VoIP telephony, mobile access, and
community collaboration tools such as chat rooms, easy
connection to experts, and screen sharing. IBM Lotus
Quickr is team collaboration software with an extensive set
of content and team services. On the content side, Quickr
provides content libraries to organize and share content as
well as personal file sharing, where each user decides who
will have access to his or her files. Quickr also enables
creation of team places (shared workspaces), including
team calendars, discussion forums, blogs, and wikis. Like
Microsoft, IBM has hosted groupware services available.
IBM LotusLive Notes uses the Notes client loaded on a PC
to access a Domino server hosted by IBM—again, SaaS.
IBM also offers a less expensive option called LotusLive
iNotes, which is a Web client accessing a server hosted by
IBM. LotusLive iNotes provides e-mail service, but does
not have full Domino functionality. An interesting
specialized groupware area deals with electronic meeting
support systems, and we will talk more about this area in
the next chapter.
Groupware, like ERP systems, is a growth area in the
software industry as well as an evolving area. To gain a
greater understanding of this area, let us take a closer look
at a leading groupware product, Lotus Notes.An Example Groupware System: Lotus Notes
Lotus Development Corporation’s first important product
was 1-2-3, and it became the dominant spreadsheet
package in the 1980s and early 1990s. The second impor-
tant product was Notes, a groupware system originally
featuring strong document-sharing features and a reason-
able e-mail package that has grown into a more full-
featured product. Notes—and Lotus’s expertise in developing
PC and client/server software—were important to IBM,
which paid $3.5 billion to purchase Lotus in 1995. IBM
was already a software powerhouse, as we have noted
earlier in this book, but its strength was in large machine
software. IBM felt it needed to bolster its PC software
prowess to compete with Microsoft in that market, and it
also wanted the Notes groupware product. IBM has
allowed Lotus to operate as a separate business unit, and
the buyout seems to have benefited both IBM and Lotus.
Users can configure the welcome page of Lotus
Notes to their liking; Figure 5.9 shows the slightly
customized welcome page used by one of the authors of
this book. At the top left of the screen is the menu bar
containing the menus of commands used to perform tasks
within Notes. Just below the menu bar is a row of icons
that permit the user to perform tasks quickly by clicking
the mouse on an icon. Below the row of icons is an address
box. To go to a Web address you have not visited before,
enter the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) in the address(^2) Actually, Microsoft Exchange is the name of the server program, while
Microsoft Outlook is the name of the client program that runs on a PC.
However, it is common for users to refer to the Microsoft Outlook/
Microsoft Exchange combination as a Microsoft Exchange groupware
system.
(^3) In this case, Lotus Notes is the name of the client program that runs on a
PC. Lotus Domino is the name of the server program. However, it is com-
mon for users to refer to the Lotus Notes/Lotus Domino combination as a
Lotus Notes groupware system.