Next, the company began leveraging Lotus Notes and Domino to add business value in the form of applications for improved collaboration, document management and partner relations.

Some of these examples included team collaboration, document management, and partner relations.

Team collaboration
To speed collaboration among in-house staff and external partners, they began to use Lotus QuickPlace, a template-like Domino application that makes it easy to develop online teams. The QuickPlaces streamlined the process of configuring teams, gathering and categorizing key data and documents, defining document types and data, and creating discussion threads and collaborative meetings.

Document management
To assist researchers and engineers in navigating through and organizing thousands of documents, a document management, searchable application was developed. Historically, whenever Nektar changes or approves a standard operating procedure, the company's Quality Assurance Documentation (QAD) staff must find every document that references that procedure and manually change it. Today, with key documents stored on a shared document control server, Domino's Domain Search feature enables the QAD staff to quickly access a needed document.

Partner relations
Nektar began to use Notes/Domino-based applications to improve partner relations, a critical factor in accelerating development time. For example, the company was working with its collaborator, Pfizer, to develop Exubera (inhaled insulin). As part of the development process, Pfizer needed regular reports counting the number of documents produced for the project. By incorporating a database for automated counting in a Notes application, Nektar is now able to count the number of documents in seconds.

Phase II: Integration Through WebSphere
Due to the success of the Lotus Notes and Domino installation and the positive feedback from various departments in Nektar, Heidi won corporate approval to embark on the next phase of the project: developing the company portal to provide a single point of access for these applications.

Technically speaking, they had already paved the way for the portal while developing the Notes-based business applications. They now had the focus to develop these applications, Web-enable their business applications and develop consistent departmental workspaces resembling their home pages. The similar look and feel of the WebSphere portal and home page made the transition easier for the Nektar IT department and ultimately the users.

When Heidi and her group began to review potential portal technologies, they considered the usual alternatives: Plumtree, Jasmine, etc. But they found that these were not as flexible as IBM's WebSphere portal. Furthermore, a major benefit of WebSphere was Nektar's ability to integrate its existing Notes and Domino applications into WebSphere.

The Nektar vision was to offer all employees access to the portal from a Web browser, bringing company information and applications into a single, collaborative online workplace. Using WebSphere with Domino would allow them to do this. They wanted to offer custom features for every class of user, including middle management, senior management, telecommuters, road warriors, and select associates, contractors and partners. The scalability and reliability of WebSphere enabled them to create a portal for all business functions, as well as provide the individual users with the ability to customize their views.