introduction
IBM? WebSphere? Portal provides a framework and many additional technologies that enable companies to create personalized, scalable, secure merchants to merchants (Business-To-Business, B2B), businesses to consumers (Business- To-consumer, B2C) and the business-to-employee, b2e portal portal.
All of these types of portals can benefit by using collaboration functions. In the B2E portal, you can use collaborative features to increase employee efficiency and productivity. You can also use these features in the B2C and B2B portals to improve customer service, or drive information between partner companies.
This article will explain the collaboration functionality provided by WebSphere Portal. The core component of WebSphere Portal Portal Server is included with some basic collaboration functions. The comprehensive collaborative function is provided by Lotus Technology (such as Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, and Lotus Quickplace), which is part of WebSphere Portal Expeend, WebSphere Portal Express Plus and WebSphere Portal Experience. This article describes the basic collaborative components, focusing on how Lotus products apply to IBM collaborative portal solutions.
You can further expand the collaboration functions described herein through WebSphere Portal Collaboration Center. Collaboration Center is a set of useful collaborative portlets, providing functions of search, connection, and cooperating with others. This article does not discuss these portlets, but you can get the description, installation instructions, and corresponding portlets about these portlets from IBM Portlet Catalog.
Overview
The portal is a web site that provides an access point for the portal users, enabling them to access many resources, including information and applications from different sources. All resources are presented in a portal to meet the unique needs of each portal user. But the portal is more than just an attractive user interface, but it can be used to touch resources that are difficult to access and use. In fact, core portal services include personalized, integrated search, collaboration, management, security, workflow, application access, and integration, and functions such as web content management. Techniques for providing these services are also known as horizontal portals.
WebSphere Portal is a horizontal portal. As shown in Figure 1, the WebSphere Portal infrastructure provides several services in order to be with others, processes, corporate applications, content, databases, and file systems from enterprise joint content providers, and file systems. Information interacts. The following is listed below:
Representation provides a web-based user interface and support for popularization equipment. These services include layout and content editor, subject, and skin, and support for multiple languages. Personalization provides targeted content according to user profiles and preferences. Search and Categorize services include searching related information in the resource library and classify the results. Collaboration Services provides users with some tools that provide instant messaging, teamroom, shared space, and email functions. Applications and Workflow service integrates new and old applications. Integration services are responsible for handling connectors, standards, and Enterprise Application Integration, EAI. Publish and Subscribe service creates a new web content and publishes the subscriber. Portlets are taggers inside the entire portal page. They provide access to backend applications or content libraries (such as email servers, web pages, or databases). WebSphere Portal with a large number of portlets. It also provides a portlet API that enables developers to develop their own portlets. Administration and Security services include single sign-on, universal authentication and authorization, and performance monitor. Figure 1. WebSphere Portal infrastructure
Customers can build a vertical portal using horizontal portal services. Vertical portal represents a specific portal, such as merchants to merchants (B2B), merchants to consumers (B2C) and merchants to their employees (B2E) portals.
The B2C portal provides a personalized view of the merchant. The main focus of the B2C portal is to provide customers with access points accessing various business services and information. In order to improve customer loyalty, the B2C portal provides refresh, personalized data at each customer returns to the portal site. B2B portal provides business process views between partner companies. Since most of the data displayed is confidential data between partner companies, the B2B portal needs external network security. Finally, the B2E portal is mainly focused on the development of enterprise applications and the development of groups. This type of portal requires specific collaborative applications and tools.
In order to provide a horizontal portal service and meet the different requirements of vertical portal, WebSphere Portal combines the top technology of all IBM Software Group brands.
WebSphere products provide basic portal features, such as representation, personalization, and application integration. Tivoli products provide security and management functions. The Integration Of Data Management technology implements storage and management of digital content, structured and unstructured content from the portal environment. Lotus products provide collaboration capabilities that allow team sharing documents and efficiently perform cross-sectoral, cross-enterprise or cross-country project work.
WebSphere Portal allows customers to develop and deploy personalized, scalable and secure vertical portals.
This article will explain the collaboration functionality provided by WebSphere Portal. Basic collaboration portlets and features can be obtained through WebSphere Enable. Advanced collaborative services and features are included in IBM WebSphere Portal Extend and IBM WebSphere Portal Experience. These collaboration features provide synchronous and asynchronous communication based on Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime, and Lotus QuickPlace technology, including email, instant messaging, forum, teamroom, shared calendar, using whiteboard, and so on. At first glance, these collaborative features are especially suitable for B2E portal. They can promote exchanges between employees, enabling employees to communicate with colleagues using chat and email functions, participate in electronic conferences, share documents, and use virtual teams to discuss their ideas. However, by providing improved customer service and promoting information flow between partner companies, B2C and B2B portals can also benefit from the comprehensive collaboration function of WebSphere Portal.
WebSphere Portal products
WebSphere Portal products include WEPSPHERE Portal Enable, WebSphere Portal Expert, and WebSphere Portal EXPEREnce. There are also two products that target the SMB market: WebSphere Portal Express and WebSphere Portal Express Plus. This section will not discuss their packaging issues.
WebSphere Portal ENABLE
WebSphere Portal enabled contains the following components:
Portal Server 4.2 WebSphere Application Server Advanced Edition 4.0.4 IBM Directory Server 4.2 DB2 Universal Database 7.2 WebSphere Studio Application Developer 4.0.3 WebSphere Portal Content Publishing 4.2 Lotus Domino Application Server 5.0.11 Lotus Workflow 3.0
WebSphere Portal Server
WebSphere Portal Server is the core components of WebSphere Portal. It integrates all WebSphere Portal components by providing the necessary connectivity services, management services and representations.
WebSphere Application Server
WebSphere Application Server (hereinafter referred to as Application Server) is a web application server based on Java technology. Application Server is a platform running Portal Server. It provides the J2EE service required for WebSphere Portal and performs Java Portlets, JavaBean, Java Server Page (JSP), and Enterprise Java Server Page (JSP), and Enterprise Java Server Page (JSP), and Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) for WebSphere Portal components. Application Server also provides a set of services for deployment environments, such as the cluster, performance, availability, connectivity, scalability, security, and transaction functions required for WebSphere Portal components.
WebSphere Studio Application Developer
WebSphere Studio Application Developer (hereinafter referred to as WebSphere Studio) is built on the opening standard and Eclipse project. It is a J2EE app for building, testing, testing, testing, tested, taking HTML pages, servlet, java server pages (jsp), and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) components. And, WebSphere Studio also creates a web service based on open standards (such as UDDI, SOAP, and WSDL), generates an XML document according to DTD, provides a collaborative team environment, and makes the end-to-end local and remote tests possible. It also uses wizards, code generators, and best practices to create high quality applications. Combined with IBM Portal Toolkit v4.1, WebSphere Studio enables developers to quickly and easily create portlets. You can also use WebSphere Studio to develop debugging and deployment tools for portlet. Portal Toolkit comes with a sample portlet, which demonstrates the best portlet programming practice.
IBM also provides a WEBSPHERE Portal content publishing wizard for WebSphere Studio. These wizards can help Portlet developers create and deploy personalized portlets that meet portal user interests and needs.
WebSphere Portal Content Publishing
WebSphere Portal Content Publishing is a browser-based tool that provides some basic web content development technologies required for portal customers. It enables users to easily create, publish, and manage web content quickly. To achieve efficient content development, the content tool also provides features such as template management, workflow, and approval, version management, and access control. This tool enables business executives to create personalized web pages and portlets that meet specific needs and preferences of a specific user. Personalized content makes the portal site more interesting and enhances customer loyalty and attracts more customers. The personalization feature contained in the content tool can be provided:
Based on rules, this requires users, content, and rules that map users to content. Information about the user is usually stored in the user profile. The content consists of data, which is formatted and displayed on the web page or in the portlet. These rules specify the content you want to display on the web page according to user features. The page or portlet requires a rule to generate a segment of the page or portlet. At runtime, the rules are processed, and the corresponding content is displayed in the page or portlet. Based on the recommended personalization, this requires the use of collaborative filtration and advanced statistical models to summarize some trends according to the behavior of Web site visits. Based on the recommended personalization is usually used to recommend products to the site visitor, implement cross-selling and uplink sales. Sports, this management creates personalized emails that will send to specific recipients. Email content can include registration products or product introductions.
WebSphere Portal Extend
WebSphere Portal Extend includes all products of WebSphere Portal Enable and adds collaborative components, parallel, distributed, different types of search capabilities, and Web site analysis. The following is additional components of WebSphere Portal Extend:
Lotus Sametime 3.0 Lotus QuickPlace 3.0 Lotus Collabonce Components WebSphere Site Analyzer 4.1.2 IBM Lotus Extended Search R3.8
Lotus Sametime
Lotus Sametime provides instant messaging, sharing whiteboard, and applications for electronic conferences. The portal integrates Sametime features to access chat sessions, netizens and venue perceptions (Awareness). Perception is to know that the member is online, offline or the ability to "can't find". You can also use the corresponding portlet to access a variety of services from the portal environment, such as application sharing, whiteboard, and online conference. You can configure a single sign-in between Sametime and WebSphere Portal Server so that users accessing the portal can also access the Lotus Sametime component without having to be prompted to log in again. WebSphere Portal Extend license includes chatting and netizens awareness. Electronic conferences, applications sharing and whiteboard are part of WebSphere Portal Experience. Lotus QuickPlace
Lotus QuickPlace provides workspaces for sharing and organizing ideas, documents, tasks, or schedule entries. QuickPlace portlet is included with WebSphere Portal, you can configure it to display the QuickPlace user interface. You can configure a single sign-in between Lotus and WebSphere Portal Server so that users accessing the portal can also access the Lotus QuickPlace component without having to be prompted to log in again.
Lotus Collaborative Components
Lotus Collaborative Components, also known as CollaBorative Services (CS), provides Java API methods and tags for JSP. Application developers can use Collaborative Components to design and implement portlets that combine Domino, Lotus Quickplace and Lotus Sametime features.
IBM Lotus Extended Search
Lotus Extended Search implements parallel, distributed, different types of search between Lotus Domino servers, databases, Microsoft INDEX Server, and Internet, and many other resources. Portal users do not have to know the specific details of these different systems. Extended Search Portlet Management and Configure Extended Search Server, which also performs search in the portal environment.
Tivoli Site Analyzer
Tivoli Site Analyzer is a web-based application that captures and analyzes a variety of web site data to provide reports on visitor traffic, visitor behavior, site usage, site content, and site structure. WebSphere Site Analyzer features include integration support for WebSphere Portal. Login, registration, portlet, and page usage, portlet operation, creation, and delete pages and places, the number of changes, and the statistics such as the page and the store will be tracked. You can use WebSphere Site Analyzer to analyze data about portal usage, such as the rankings of the visitor viewing the portal page and the portal login trend.
WebSphere Portal Experience
WebSphere Portal Experience includes all components of WebSphere Portal Extend. It adds some tools to develop and deploy portals that use advanced collaboration, advanced content management, and security policy management. Additional products included with Portal Experience include:
IBM Content Manager and Eip Client Kit (Web Application Enabler for IBM Content Manager) for e-commerce IBM Tivoli Access Manager other Sametime and QuickPlace features IBM Content Manager
Content Manager is an optimized content management system for large-scale collection of structured and unstructured content. Content Manager Manages Scanned Images, Faxes, PC files, XML, and rich media, and web content. Content Manager also provides folder management and document workflows.
IBM Tivoli Access Manager
Tivoli Access Manager is a secure management solution that provides centralized authentication, authorization, and single sign-on cross-enterprise applications. Tivoli Access Manager is unified and flexible to manage the strong security of WebSphere Application Server and non-WebSphere Application Server applications.
Build a collaborative portal
To enable comprehensive collaboration in the WebSphere Portal environment, first install WebSphere Portal Expend or WebSphere Portal Express Plus. This part does not tell the installation process, but will describe how to integrate collaborative functions into the portal. This section will discuss integration with the following products:
Email, calendar, or to do list, integrated Lotus Notes, integrated Lotus Sametime, real-time collaboration function integration Lotus QuickPlace asynchronous collaboration
Configuration overview
The physical environment is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Concept verification plan for collaborative portal
In this scenario, the primary essential component of the Portal Server environment is installed on a machine, while the entire Domino environment, including Lotus Sametime and Lotus QuickPlace, which is installed on another machine. All components are installed using the installation manager. The installation manager is a software installer with WebSphere Portal.
In conceptual verification and testing or development environments, use dual-machine installation, while each machine is equipped with at least 512 MB of memory and 800 MHz processors. However, in the production environment, it is highly recommended to separate the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, LDAP Server to the WebSphere Application Server environment to improve performance. The production environment may have installed an LDAP and reasonable adjustment, optimized database servers. In this case, you can install WebSphere Application Server and Portal Server, integrate existing LDAP configurations, and use the database server as their configuration database. Since Portal Server is an application running under WebSphere Application Server, you can improve performance by applying a variety of WebSphere Application Server topologies (such as level clones and vertical clones). To avoid Sametime and QuickPlace servers to compete for resources in the production environment, install and configure them on two different machines.
LDAP directory
Domino uses its own LDAP directory (ie Domino's name and address book) as part of the entire product. In this case, Domino acts as a LDAP directory. Both Lotus Sametime, Lotus QuickPlace, and Portal Server support this situation, allowing users to register in an external directory. You must enable LDAP in the Domino directory to use the user registry. During installation, QuickPlace and Sametime are installed as part of Domino and configure them to use the Domino directory for user authentication. You must also enable HTTP in the Domino directory. Some collaborative portlets require this to access Domino data over Domino HTTP.
In addition to HTTP and LDAP, the Domino directory must also enable DIIOP. Diiop is a protocol used by collaborative portlets to open a security session with collaboration servers (such as Domino, Sametime or QuickPlace, and get information from the database. In Domino LDAP, administrators can specify who can perform request operations via DIIOP. For security solutions, the user profile should have specified the Internet password used to connect.
It is recommended to use the Domino Administrator shown in Figure 3 to register portal users and groups. During this process, Domino creates a mail file for each user and sets the Internet password for the database. You can also register users from the portal environment using the Manage Uses and Groups Portlet. However, mail files and other required settings are not automatically created, so users will not use the mail features in the portal environment.
Figure 3. User registration
sign in
Single sign-on feature allows portal users to enter the portal after a certification, and then access all other resources integrated into the portal. When you implement a single sign-on feature between WebSphere and Domino, you must have an LDAP directory (such as a Domino Directory). LDAP is a network protocol that allows any application to access directory information and perform authentication services, such as verifying usernames and passwords.
In this collaborative portal environment, single-point login feature uses lightweight third party authentication, ltpa, and LTPA. LTPA allows WebSphere and Domino servers to authenticate to the public user directory using LDAP.
The portal is configured as a secure web application that runs on the WebSphere Application Server. When the user tries to access this secure web application, the WebSphere Application Server receives the request for this application and redirects the user to a login form that prompts the user to provide his information for authentication. This form sends this information to the PORTAL Server authentication servlet (it gets user information). Then this servlet calls the corresponding security feature of WebSphere Application Server, which is then checked according to the LDAP directory check.
After successful authentication of WebSphere Application Server, the user logs in to enter. His portal session is started, and a LTPA cookie is propagated together with the HTTP session cookie to the client. WebSphere and Domino applications can use this cookie to subsequent requests so that they do not have to repeat the authentication process.
To enable single sign-on, enable multiple server session certifications in Domino Server. During the WebSphere Portal installation, you need to configure Global Security. This configuration work will be automatically completed by the installation manager when the corresponding selection is made during the installation process. After installation, you need to generate an LTPA key from the WebSphere Application Server management console and import it from the WebSphere Application Server management console into the Domino Server described in WebSphere Advanced Edition Security. The LTPA key is used by WebSphere Application Server and Domino to encrypt and decrypt the LTPA token. In order to make a single sign-on feature functions, the browser client must enable cookie support.
Site and page
WebSphere Portal 4.2 provides a typographic version of this concept. You can build the places and pages and nested pages. You can use the places and pages to classify them. They can use the pages and venues when the user has views (VIEW), Edit (Edit) and Management (Manage) permissions. View Access Allows users to view resources, such as a page. Edit access allows users to modify resource parameters, such as modifying the layout and content of the page. In this case, only this particular user can see these changes. Managing access allows users to modify resource parameters such that any modifications made by the user can be seen by all other pages users. With Security Portlets, portal administrators can grant access to a specific user group, all authenticated users, or all anonymous portal users (non-authenticated users).
Portal administrators and other portal users can create and customize new places and pages. A specific portlet called Edit Layout and Content Allows the user to define the layout and arrange the portlet on the portal page. Using the Manage Places and Pages Portlets and Choose Skins portlets, users can define the appearance and feel of the created place by using the skin and the subject. Skin definitions show modifications around the portlet. The overall appearance of the subject definition site, including logos, fonts, colors, and more.
The portal administrator can delegate access to other portal users, such as subprime administrators. Users who have a delegate license for a resource (such as a place or a set of users), can grant access to the location to these users.
Every place is possible to define a bookmark. Portal users can store personal bookmarks, and the portal administrator can store bookmarks for a particular location so that all users who use this place can use these bookmarks. The bookmark is stored on the server instead of the browser, allowing all venue users who use any browser to see them. You can use bookmarks to point to URLs, news articles, or other information on the interior network or Internet.
The above places and page concepts are an important basic feature of the collaborative portal. It enables administrators to create a location, create a page in the place, implant the contents and applications into these pages, and grant a specific user or user group on these places and pages. With this concept, users with common hobbies can use the same places and bookmarks, engaged in similar work groups to share documents, engaged in teams that are engaged in the same project can share other users who are not accessible. Tools and applications.
Lotus Notes integration
For easy use of email, WebSphere Portal provides portlet applications for Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. The portlets provided for Microsoft Exchange integrate the user's mailbox view, calendar, and list of contacts, and contact lists for Microsoft Exchange 2000. Users must configure the destination of Microsoft Exchange 2000 servers in each portlet. To support Lotus Notes, WebSphere Portal provides two types of portlet applications. The first is the Lotus Notes portlet application, the second is the INOTES portlet application. This section will focus on the Portlet application that provides Lotus Notes. We will explain how to build the corresponding portlet, how to use these portlets and the advantages of each portlet application.
Lotus Notes portlet
Both Lotus Notes portlets are in the Notes2.war file, which is automatically installed during the installation of WebSphere Portal. The portlets included in this WAR file are:
MyNotescalendar Mynotesmail MyNotestodo Notesmail Notesview
These portlets are this MVC portlet, which runs and retrieves data from Domino Server from the Domino Server on Portal Server.
The portal administrator needs to check some configuration parameters before the collaborative portal environment provides these portlets. In general, these parameters can be set as shown in FIG.
Figure 4. Lotus Notes portlet configuration
The value of the LDAP_NABServer parameter indicates the Domino LDAP directory name used to retrieve user mail server names and database names. If you set the value of Notesserver to @mailServer, MyNotescalendar, MyNotesmail, and MyNotestodo portlets are used to use the LDAP_NABSERVER parameter. If the value of the NotesDatabase parameter is set to @mailfile, then MyNotescalendar, MyNotesmail, and MyNotestodo portlets will automatically find the user's mail database name. You can find a detailed description of these parameters and other parameters in the WebSphere Portal Information Center.
MyNotesmail Portlet
MyNotesmail Portlet enables portal users to access their Notes mail. This portlet's user interface and the appearance of the entire portal are corresponding (see Figure 5).
Figure 5. Lotus Notes Mail Portlet
In the column where the name of the mail sender is displayed, the portlet also shows whether the sender is online. This feature is called Internet people online sensory, and we will discuss this function later.
Users can read the message by clicking on the message topic. In this case, a new window that displays the message content will pop up. Users can also start the mail application from the portlet. This will have a new window that provides email functions (such as reply, forwarding, new mail, etc.). See Figure 6.
Figure 6. Start the mail application from the Lotus Notes portlet
Depending on user configuration, portlets can display different views, row colors, file size columns, or attachment icons column. The editing mode of the portlet and the preferred item provided are shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7. Lotus Notes Mail Portlet - Edit Mode
MyNotescalendar portlet
MYNOTESCALENDAR portlet (see Figure 8) Allows the portal user to check your own calendar entry. Users can choose to see if they want to see a day in this portlet or two weeks, or you can also choose to view a month. This portlet also allows users to launch applications to help them manage Notes calendars and create new appointments, events, and anniversary entries and reminders.
Figure 8. Lotus Notes Calendar Portlet
The portlet's edit mode allows you to change the portlet title while also allowing you to select the appearance of the calendar by default, as shown in Figure 9.
Figure 9. Lotus Notes Calendar Portlet - Edit Mode
MyNotestodo portlet
MyNotestodo portlet allows portal users to manage their list of things to do. Users can create new work-on-actions and change the status of the available items.
Figure 10. Lotus Notes Todo portlet
Notesmail Portlet and NotesView Portlet
You can configure Notesmail Portlets and NotesView portlets to access any mail database and any view of any user access. Users need at least read access to the web. You can configure this NotesView portlet to display an entry in the Names.nsf database.
Figure 11. NOTES VIEW portlet displaying the names.nsf database
To configure this portlet in edit mode, you can follow the following:
Enter a portlet title. Select source names.nsf from available sources. Select View People from the available view. Do not change the default protocol selection. Click Next.
Figure 12. NOTES View Portlet in Edit mode
Select the Style you want to use in your own portlet. Select Name for Column for Showing People Aware. Select the columns you don't want to display in the portlet. Select Ascending for Direction for Default Sort Column. Click OK.
Figure 13. NOTES View Portlet in Edit mode
INOTES portlet
INOTES portlet uses INOTES Web Access Technology. These portlets provide secure and wealth of Domino infrastructure through a browser. INOTES Web Access uses DHTML and XML. Notes and INOTES Web Access are complementary products.
To use the INOTES portlet, the Domino server should be prepared using the INOTES template. Domino administrator needs to perform the following command in the Domino server console:
Load Compact -a Mail / * Load Convert Mail / * * INOTES5 LOAD Updall
INOTES portlets are packaged in the inotes.war file, which is automatically installed during the installation of WebSphere Portal Extend. The portlets provided by this package are:
INOTESMAIL INOTESTODO INOTESCALENDAR INOTESCONTACTACTESNOTESNOTEBOOK
Figure 14 shows the INOTES MAIL Portlet, Calendar Portlet, and Todo Portlet.
Figure 14. INOTES portlet
These portlets need to have a Domino server name entry, the database entry to be used and the user password entry for the database (see Figure 15).
Figure 15. INOTES CALENDAR portlet - Edit mode
There is no integrated portal in the INOTES portlet than the Lotus Notes portlet that appears in the previous part. The reason is that INOTES portlet is just an IFRAME for true INOTES applications. iframe is an HTML constructor embedded in an HTML document with a document (such as a web page). The disadvantage of the INOTES portlet caused by this is that only a few browsers support IFRAME. Moreover, INOTES portlets also do not have online perception of netizens.
Lotus Sametime Integration
Sametime portlet
With the Sametime function, team members can make real-time collaboration. Users can see who online and send a message to him asked for specific questions. They can also work with remote team members by sharing data and applications in the process of online conferences.
The following sections will provide you with recommendations on how to integrate Sametime into the WebSphere Portal environment. These recommendations will focus on how to allow Sametime to perform portal level and portlet level access control.
By default, basic Sametime portlet is installed in WebSphere Portal Extend. If not installed, you can use Sametime.war to install the Sametime portlet. This portlet allows portal users to use Lotus Sametime without installing a Sametime client in their own machine. The portal administrator needs to add this portlet to a portal page and set as required as shown in Figure 16, including the Sametime server parameters, and server port parameters.
Figure 16. Sametime portlet configuration
The provided Sametime portlet contains a link to start the Sametime application.
Figure 17. Sametime portlet
Instant messaging
By clicking the Launch Sametime link, the user can boot the Sametime application from the Sametime portlet. This will have a new window that provides access to Sametime features (such as instant messaging).
Figure 18. Instant messaging
Users must first create their own contact list to send instant messages or start electronic conferences. The contact list contains people who want to communicate with them. By double-click the name in the contact list, the user can start interactive conversation. In this Sametime application, users can manage their online status. Online status tells others if this person can participate in online chat and electronic conferences. Each online status (active, left and do not disturb) is indicated by a unique icon and a customizable online status message.
Electronic conference
The portal users can also launch an electronic conference from the Sametime window described in the previous part. Users can choose which tools to provide for this electronic conference. Optional tools include chat, audio, video, application sharing, and whiteboard. In addition, the meeting initiator can also invite other users to participate in this meeting.
Figure 19. Preparing electronic conference
All participants with the required access can display information using screen sharing or whiteboards during the meeting. Although these two tools can help share and display information, their use is very different. Use screen sharing when you need to use an external program. Whiteboard is used to make a brainstorm conference, display the included file or create a presentation with the provided whiteboard tool.
In the conference, participants can dialogue with computer audio and video, as they are opening a face-to-face meeting. They can use chat features to send a write message to everyone on the meeting. If a participant needs to chat alone and someone, he (she) can select this person's name from Participant List and start the instant messaging session.
Figure 20. Opening an efficient meeting
Figure 20 shows a meeting room for WPSADMIN. There are also two people involved in this meeting. This meeting uses all available tools (such as audio, video, chat, screen sharing, and application sharing). WPSADMIN is speaking. Other participants can "raise their hands" request to speak if there is a problem. If video is configured, the participant can switch between their own videos and speakers. Lotus QuickPlace integration
In large organizations, people gather together to engage in a project and let them share ideas and experiences are extremely challenging. Therefore, when people are in different geographic locations or different time zones, they need virtual fields to interact, share documents, give feedback or management of other project-centered activities.
WebSphere Portal provides a focus on Lotus QuickPlace that resolves asynchronous collaboration issues. Lotus QuickPlace is a platform for teams to provide collaboration tools (such as discussion room, calendar, task list, and shared document library).
WebSphere Portal has two portlets related to QuickPlace. The first one in the QuickPlace.war file. Users can customize this portlet so they can launch and related virtual collaborations through the drop-down list. The selected QuickPlace will appear in a separate browser window. In addition, this portlet also provides links to the web page that creates a new place.
Figure 21. Starting QuickPlace
The QuickPlace2.war file provides an in-line quickplace portlet. In Figure 22, this portlet is used to point to the specific location created by the previous QuickPlace web page. Use the edit mode to specify the portlet title, server, and QuickPlace to use.
Figure 22. QuickPlace portlet
Every time you create a place, the creator of the site (such as a team responsible person) adds the name of the team member to the location and grants them appropriate access - readers, author (author) or manager (Manager) ). After the location is created, you will use an email that contains the URL of the team sharing place to notify all members. Thus, the entire team can join a shared collaborative workspace. When adding a new member to the location, the team's person in charge can add them as a member to the QuickPlace. In this way, new members can access all project assets immediately.
QuickPlace has some built-in workflow options so that team members can point documents to one or more people before publishing documents or notifying other members, allowing them to approve documents or operate on documents.
Build people awareness portlet
WebSphere Portal 4.2 contains some Lotus Collaborative Service. These services provide some API methods and tag libraries to extend collaborative functions of Lotus products to all portals buffed by WebSphere Portal Extend or WebSphere Portal Experience. With Lotus Collaboration Services to use Lotus Domino, Lotus Quickplace, Lotus Sametime, and Lotus Discovery Server, you can develop and implement user interface extensions in any portal or portlet. WebSphere Portal 4.2 provides services:
People Service provides online perception. This portlet can determine if a portal user is online and his (her) online state. This service can be obtained by JSP tag. Domino Data Service, which provides access to Domino data, including database, view, document, and information related to directory. You can use this service to create and edit documents, or use it to use views. Discovery Service, which provides methods for finding people, documents, profiles, and knowledge maps. But this service will work only when Discovery Server is installed as a portal. QuickPlace Service, which provides methods for creating and managing new Lotus QuickPlace. Menu Service, it displays a pop-up menu in the portal. You can add a corresponding JSP tag to create an online status indicator and a pop-up menu that allows you to choose a collaboration (such as email, chat, or any other function). The Markup of the People Service JSP tag (TAG) is added as shown below.
<% @ page language = "java" import = "com.lotus.cs. *"%> <% @ Taglib URI = "/ web-inf / TLD / people) prefix =" sametime "%> <% @ Taglib URI = "/ Web-INF / TLD / MENU.TLD" prefix = "menu"%>
