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 was 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, which could run inside of a desktop rich client as well as a web browser.
Because the goal of Workplace largely overlapped IBM's existing Lotus Notes and Domino 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 how Workplace and Notes/Domino products would be integrated with each other. 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.
Read more about this topic: IBM Workplace
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