IBM Workplace Services Express

Chapter 1. Introduction 3

򐂰 IBM WebSphere Everyplace® products

Figure 1-1 IBM Workplace family of products

1.3 What is IBM Workplace Services Express?

IBM Workplace Services Express is software that makes it easy for you, your

colleagues, your teams, and your entire organization to quickly collaborate and

effectively work together. Designed specifically for small and medium-sized

organizations with less than a thousand employees, or departmental needs in

larger organizations, Workplace Services Express enables you to easily create,

edit, and share documents from your own customized Workplace environment.

IBM Workplace Services Express provides document management, collaborative

team spaces, instant messaging, and access to Lotus Domino or Microsoft®

Exchange e-mail and calendars (or POP3 and IMAP e-mail), all from a single,

unified interface. Colleagues and teams can work together easily using intuitive,

adaptable Workplace environments for creating, editing, and sharing documents

right from their desktop or Web browser.

4 IBM Workplace Services Express

Core capabilities of IBM Workplace Services Express include:

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Creation of team spaces: Built-in, ready-to-use templates to create

collaborative work environments for users to participate in discussions,

organize a team project calendar, chat with team members, and enable

co-workers to create, search for, edit, and share project documents from their

Microsoft Windows® desktop, Microsoft Office application, or Web browser.

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Document sharing: Workplace Services Express is a server-managed

platform, which means that your documents, your information, and your entire

customized Workplace environment are stored on the server. Documents can

be shared in central document libraries, where multiple users can share

documents, edit, participate in approvals processes, and control versioning,

enabling you and your team to work better together.

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Drag and drop customization: End users can customize a personalized

experience and add links and business applications with a simple, intuitive

interface.

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Desktop productivity: Designed to work with what you have, for example,

Microsoft users enjoy easy and elegant integration with Windows Explorer

and Microsoft Office applications, and works with existing Microsoft Office

2000 and XP licenses (as well as Office 2003), without requiring any Office

upgrades to gain advanced collaboration capabilities. Workplace Services

Express also includes editors of its own so that you and your team can edit

and share simple documents, without having to purchase and install

traditional, expensive desktop productivity suites on each PC.

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Real-time collaboration: Integrated presence awareness and instant

messaging is available throughout the solution, which helps users identify the

online status of team members and take action with a single click to either

send an e-mail, engage in an instant messaging chat session, or look up that

user in the directory to retrieve additional contact information.

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Search: Search capabilities include searching for content across document

libraries, discussion forums, team spaces, and intranet Web sites. Users can

also search for individuals through a People Finder capability and then initiate

collaboration based on the search result, such as initiating an instant

messaging session or creating an e-mail.

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Application access: This feature provides the ability to integrate business

applications and information into a single point of access and adds

collaborative services around that access in the context of a collaborative

portal. Tools are also available to help create the application access.

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Simplified installation and management: A single server configuration

process that installs the necessary server components and provides unified

management access.

Chapter 1. Introduction 5

Workplace Services Express presents the user with a Welcome page when they

log on to the system. Figure 1-2 shows the Welcome page and highlights the key

components of the page.

Figure 1-2 Quick tour of the IBM Workplace Services Express Welcome page

On the Welcome page, the user has access to the following features:

򐂰 Main navigator: This navigator enables the user to select one of the four main

pages for Workplace Services Express: Welcome, Mail, Team Spaces, and

Search.

򐂰 Tools navigation: This is a list of the links to the tools included with Workplace

Services Express and the help system. Depending on the assigned policies,

the user might see links to My Workplace, Templates, Administration, Edit my

profile, Actions, Help, and Log out.

򐂰 Getting Started portlet: This briefly describes the facilities available for the

users of Workplace Services Express.

򐂰 Awareness: This is the indicator for the user’s instant messaging status. It will

normally show “I am available,” “I am away,” or “Do not Disturb.”

Main Navigator

Getting Started Portlet

Tools Navigation

IM Contacts

Search for

People

Awareness