Lotus Greenhouse

A nurturing environment for growth and innovation... that's the thought behind Lotus® Greenhouse. This is a rich Web environment where interested parties can experience the latest collaborative technologies from Lotus software and join an exciting community for learning and ideas exchange. Participants can work with new Lotus products in a hosted environment at no charge, learn ways to augment the value of products they may already own, and interact with others towards enhancing current capabilities and driving future innovation. The Greenhouse community is powered by IBM Lotus Connections social software which provides the collaboration forum.

A prototype for Lotus Greenhouse was premiered at Lotusphere® in 2007, with an open invitation for all attendees to use and explore it. This was a big hit and generated enthusiasm for creating an ongoing community to continue the conversations. Initially, the Greenhouse was focused on IBM® Lotus Connections, the breakthrough integrated social software product IBM announced in January, 2007 and launched in June. During that interval, multiple iterations of Lotus Connections were put up in Lotus Greenhouse to elicit feedback, observe how participants were using it and learn from their experiences. This process yielded invaluable insights for enhancing the product to better serve customer needs. Based on that success, other Lotus products have since been added to the Greenhouse environment, and its mission has continued to expand.

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Web 2.0 concepts and technologies permeate Lotus Greenhouse, most notably by expanding the possibilities of online collaboration, knowledge transfer and new knowledge creation through social networking. This is very important to the business IBM Lotus is engaged in, which is all about enabling people to work together, deriving synergy and generating new knowledge from their interactions. Consistent with these long-standing objectives, Lotus Greenhouse represents a new model for product development enhanced by the rich interactions a whole community of stakeholders can provide. This is a radical new way of doing things!

Murali Narasimhadevara joined the Lotus Greenhouse project in February, 2007 as the Lead Architect. He had previously worked in the IBM Office of the CIO where he helped to build the IBM intranet. The Greenhouse project interested him as a chance to build something comparable but attuned to the Web 2.0 world in which IBM now operates. "Things have changed quite a bit from when we just supplied discrete products, to now when rich hosted work solutions can be offered via a Web 2.0 delivery model," he says.

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Presently, Lotus Greenhouse encompasses a thriving community of over 7,500 IBM premier customers, business partners, IBM'ers and other interested parties. It rests on a highly available and scalable infrastructure that supports rapid deployments and upgrades. Some of the main featured products in Lotus Greenhouse currently include:

• IBM Lotus Connections, which enables social networking via its several components of Profiles, Dogear (bookmarking), Blogs, Activities, and Communities
• IBM Lotus Sametime® for instant messaging, presence awareness and Web conferencing
• IBM Lotus Quickr™ for team collaboration
• IBM Lotus Domino® Web Access for sending and receiving e-mail

Members of Lotus Greenhouse can enjoy free use of this environment, enlisting the resources for their own purposes to learn about the products and evaluate the user experience. For example, they can create e-meetings, share information, develop team projects, create demos, communicate through e-mail and instant messaging, and build connections and contacts with others. They can set up their own e-mail accounts and invite colleagues to join them.

Members are invited to give feedback on the products so are able to make their ideas known, identifying areas for improvement and requesting feature enhancements. Any reported defects are promptly investigated, and requested enhancements may become new product requirements. Through their interactions with the Lotus development teams and others in the community, members can influence new product directions.

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Trying out" social software products in isolation within a test or demo situation isn't really adequate for gaining a sense of the full value. By contrast, Lotus Greenhouse participants live in a richly provisioned networked community brought together by shared interests and ongoing over time. Together they can explore topics of broad appeal and learn how communities form and grow.

With the tools in Lotus Connections, members can find key leadership across IBM and industry Blogging on a wide variety of subjects, comment on the entries, and start blogs of their own. They can explore the tag clouds surrounding the Dogear bookmarks that community members are adding daily to see what peers are finding of interest on the Web. They can add their own bookmarks and access these from anywhere, importing them from their existing list of favorites or creating new ones.

Throughout Lotus Greenhouse, participants can find and connect with people of interest to them. With a single click, they can access individuals' Profiles to learn more about them, view their pictures, access their bookmarks, see what Communities they belong to and read their blogs. They can browse the growing list of defined communities and join any that suit them or create new ones. They can also use Activities to accomplish small, ad hoc projects with other members of Lotus Greenhouse.

Through simple RSS aggregation technologies, content generated through all the social networking tools in Lotus Greenhouse is consolidated, providing a snapshot of all current community activity

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A bonus feature of Lotus Greenhouse is that it demonstrates the added value customers can experience from integration across different Lotus products. In many Lotus environments, products appear as silos rather than joined as a linked family of capabilities. By contrast, the products showcased in Lotus Greenhouse are deployed in a cohesive, consolidated environment that supports an integrated user experience. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts in terms of providing ease, synergy and efficiency.

For example, if a Greenhouse member is reading a blog (supported by the blogging component of Lotus Connections), she sees the blogger's name. If the blogger is logged on as active, (indicated by the presence awareness feature of Lotus Sametime), the reader can immediately engage him with a comment or question sent via a Lotus Sametime instant message without switching applications, because these applications are linked.

In another example, say a member is in a team space within Lotus Quickr and wants to set up a meeting for his team. Without leaving the Lotus Quickr environment he can commission a Web conference for his team, create a document for the team's discussion and put it in their team space, and gain access to the actual meeting. If the meeting is one of a series, he can schedule all of the meetings from within Lotus Quickr. He does not have to switch to a separate Lotus Domino Calendar feature to create the schedule, or the Web Conferencing component in Lotus Sametime to set up the conference, or a word processing application to create the document because all these capabilities are linked for immediate access from Lotus Quickr.

These are simple integrations that can be achieved with Lotus products right out of the box. Many similar and much more complex integrations among Lotus products are readily possible.

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Lotus Greenhouse provides advantages for both the participants and IBM. Participants can try out Lotus products before they buy. They can learn best practices for their own deployments. They can help drive desired product features. And they can use the published atom API's available in products such as Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr. This gives developers an opportunity to try new ideas, show content in different applications and visualize new content relationships.

For IBM, attention to customer adoption of specific product features leads to better design of future products. Increased customer contact increases developer awareness of market issues. Product development teams learn from the Greenhouse deployment experiences, leading to adoption of infrastructure best practices. Implementation issues involved with a thriving external community are made apparent, and cross-product integration capabilities are identified.

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Future plans for Lotus Greenhouse call for doing more to show "linked value" through creative integration of various Lotus products, and the development of composite applications. There will be ongoing pursuit of new ways Lotus can work effectively with the community to understand their requirements and feed these back to the product teams. There may be "personalized" access to the Lotus Greenhouse Web site based on specific customer interests and industry segments. And there will be new means for stimulating innovative thinking about new technologies.

Recently the Lotus Greenhouse team started introducing new trial features into existing products, which . can be enabled or disabled by a simple toggle switch. These are features or ideas that might or might not ever come into the products themselves. Users can test and evaluate the trial features and register their responses.

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Other goals for Lotus Greenhouse in 2008 include working with the IBM WebSphere Portal team to provide more integration across the collaboration software portfolio using Portal. And to invite more folks in, building a bigger community and reaching out to other geographies, especially where use of Lotus products is rapidly growing such as in Australia, China and India.

Access to Lotus Greenhouse is by invitation only. Lotus customers and anyone else who is interested in Lotus software is encouraged to contact an IBM sales representative to become a member of the Lotus Greenhouse community. Registered members may then also bring in work colleagues.

For more information, go to the Lotus Greenhouse Web site at https://greenhouse.lotus.com/ to see what is available

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