IBM Workplace is a discontinued brand of

collaborative software Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them." Regar ...

applications from

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Lotus Software Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was sold to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 sprea ...

division. It was intended to be the next generation of collaboration software that would work with IBM's

Java EE Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web serv ...

-based

WebSphere Portal HCL Digital Experience is an enterprise software used to build and manage web portals. It provides access to web content and applications, while delivering personalized experiences for users. The WebSphere Portal package is a component of WebSph ...

server software. Introduced in 2003, the brand was largely disbanded by 2007, with its core technologies and many of its products rebranded as Lotus or WebSphere.

History

In 2002 at Lotusphere, IBM's annual conference for Lotus customers, IBM's Lotus division announced its Java EE-based "NextGen" initiative. This became the Workplace brand, which IBM first introduced at Lotusphere 2003. The first Workplace product is Workplace Messaging, a lightweight e-mail solution. More Workplace applications were introduced later, such as instant messaging and document management. In 2004, Workplace 2.0 was released, to run inside of a desktop

rich client In computer networking, a rich client (also called a heavy, fat or thick client) is a computer (a " client" in client–server network architecture) that typically provides rich functionality independent of the central server. This kind of comput ...

and in a web browser. Because the goal of Workplace largely overlapped IBM's existing

Lotus Notes HCL Notes (formerly Lotus Notes then IBM Notes) is a proprietary collaborative software platform for Unix ( AIX), IBM i, Windows, Linux, and macOS, sold by HCLTech. The client application is called Notes while the server component is branded ...

and

Domino Dominoes is a family of tile-based games played with gaming pieces. Each domino is a rectangular tile, usually with a line dividing its face into two square ''ends''. Each end is marked with a number of spots (also called '' pips'' or ''dots'' ...

software, Notes and Domino customers became increasingly worried that Notes and Domino would either be discontinued or at best marginalized in favor of Workplace. To assuage this fear, IBM demonstrated in 2005 plans for integrating Workplace products with Notes and Domino products. IBM also started to include Lotus Notes and Domino within the "Workplace family". However, by 2007, most Workplace-branded products were being either discontinued (such as Workplace Messaging) 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.

Foundational Technologies

IBM Workplace Client Technology is a defunct

application platform A computing platform, digital platform, or software platform is the infrastructure on which software is executed. While the individual components of a computing platform may be obfuscated under layers of Abstraction (software engineering), abstr ...

built on top of the

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event which occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ...

Rich Client Platform (RCP) 3.0, which itself is written in

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

. 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 into IBM Lotus Expeditor.

Products

IBM Workplace Collaboration Services

IBM Workplace Collaboration Services is a single product providing a set of communication and collaboration tools such as

e-mail Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

, calendaring and scheduling, awareness,

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate ( real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involv ...

e-learning Educational technology (commonly abbreviated as edutech, or edtech) is the combined use of computer hardware, software, and educational theory and practice to facilitate learning and teaching. When referred to with its abbreviation, "EdTech" ...

, team spaces,

Web conferencing Web conferencing is used as an umbrella term for various types of online conferencing and collaborative services including webinars (web seminars), webcasts, and web meetings. Sometimes it may be used also in the more narrow sense of the peer-l ...

, and document and Web

content management Content management (CM) are a set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. When stored and accessed via computers, this information may be more specifically referre ...

. IBM ended support for Workplace Collaboration Services on September 30, 2009. It has been superseded largely by Lotus-branded products, such as

Notes Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to: Music and entertainment * Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music * ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian * ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) shortened versi ...

, Sametime, Quickr, and Connections.

IBM Workplace Managed Client

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 from

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...

1.1.4 (the last version released under the Sun Industry Standards Source License). Version 2.6 was released January 23, 2006. 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 by

and

Symphony A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning c ...

. Activity Explorer functionality is now part of IBM Lotus Connections.

IBM Workplace Forms

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 as IBM Lotus Forms.

References

External links

IBM Workplace Collaboration Services support

IBM Workplace Managed Client support
{{OpenOffice, state=collapsed Groupware

Workplace A workplace is a location where someone works, for their employer or themselves, a place of employment. Such a place can range from a home office to a large office building or factory. For industrialized societies, the workplace is one of the ...

OpenOffice