David: What's the absolute "Aha" moment for Workplace Collaboration Services? What defines the perfect fit for an enterprise?

Akiba: The best way I can answer that is to share the responses we heard from customers, partners, and analysts during the research phase of creating Workplace Collaboration Services. The feedback we got was that everyone really liked the fact that this was "collaboration all-in-one". The idea that everything is in one place and highly integrated is very appealing because it's simple to use and can easily be adapted. For most people, this tended to be the "aha" moment.

One customer explained how this will save time and money in staff training. Typically, because of vacation schedules, its entire IT staff had to be trained not only on the primary products they support, but also on their backup products as well. With Workplace Collaboration Services everything is in one place, meaning less training for IT professionals and end users. In addition, this customer was very excited about the idea of minimizing all the different licenses they have to track.

David: How does Workplace Collaboration Services integrate with other collaboration tools, like Microsoft's Outlook and Messenger, AIM, and other similar tools?

Akiba: First, a key principal of IBM's overall product strategy is embracing open standards, enabling better integration with a customer's chosen set of tools and applications. IBM supports Web services and actively leads and participates in defining a variety of standards through involvement in industry boards on portlet standards, Web services, content standards, SIP, JSR 168, JSR 170, Eclipse, and more.

Support for Microsoft Outlook is based on open standards. Outlook clients are able to connect via POP3 or IMAP (Tech Preview) for Mail. This approach allows us to maintain an Outlook environment and leverage the back-end capabilities of Workplace Collaboration Services, whether it's scalability, S/MIME, shared folders, or simply sending email to a non-Outlook client.

Enterprise instant messaging applications carry much steeper security and compliance requirements than public IM programs. Our strategy is to ensure that we can provide connectivity beyond company walls in a highly secure and easy to manage way, taking advantage of the widely accepted SIP standard. Both IBM's Domino and Java based IM systems support connectivity via SIP to each other, or any other SIP-compliant IM system. This is one of the main reasons why our instant messaging product is the leading enterprise IM solution.

David: We've had some people express concern about presence awareness. They ask, isn't presence awareness an invasion of privacy? What are some of the issues and answers here?

Akiba: The business reality is that presence awareness has been invaluable in transforming the way people work. Presence awareness and instant messaging have been proven to reduce voicemail and email costs, as well as increase productivity--literally cutting cycle times into minutes instead of days or weeks.