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Virtual collaboration
Bluegrass: A virtual collaborative workplace
Priyanka Akhouri takes a look at the concept of Bluegrass
that allows teams to work, chat, and brainstorm in a virtual world, fostering
effective collaboration
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is the era of the collaborative workplace with globally dispersed teams that
need to constantly communicate, share ideas, solve business problems and do
focused teamwork together irrespective of their region or location. In a virtualized
environment, there is a genuine opportunity to leverage various devices for
communication. Since virtual worlds are a great way to have meetings, IBM introduced
its Bluegrass project, which is a virtual reality application that let workers
set-up virtual conference rooms.
The birth of Bluegrass
Companies and CIOs need to be agile and responsive. There is a requirement for
a technology in an increasingly geographically dispersed environment that allows
the virtual workforce to remain competitive. “Traditionally, in audio conferencing
when a call ends, so does the social interaction. IBM’s Project Bluegrass
makes it possible for employees to have serendipitous discussions with each
other in a geographically dispersed environment,” said Rammohan Himmatraopet,
Country Manager, Rational Software, IBM (India/ South Asia).
Bluegrass is a unique concept since it aims at bringing together social networking
and virtual reality. For example, with Bluegrass, an employee from a particular
location can have an informal conversation with another co-worker in any part
of the world. As a result, it allows workers to think more effectively and creatively
outside formal meetings, enabling them to stumble upon new ideas and focusing
on issues that concern them. This new platform is an example on how companies
can become more aware, take timely action, and act as effective decision-makers
in order to improve productivity in their organizations.
It provides employees a chance to bounce ideas to each other and talk about
business, or communicate in general. Bluegrass is an IBM research project that
examines team collaboration in virtual worlds. “It explores the use of
3D virtual worlds to support distributed work globally. Bluegrass makes it possible
for geographically distributed teams that require a ‘heads up’ to
collaborate virtually and deliver the goods in time, thereby meeting the demands
of the consumers,” added Himmatraopet.
Virtual conference rooms
Based on technologies such as Rational Jazz for software development and Lotus
Notes for business processes, it [Bluegrass] essentially creates a virtual-world
environment for the end-user. “This helps the software developers to work,
chat, and brainstorm around a virtual water cooler while seeing their teammates
alongside interactive visual representations of ideas, data from the Web and
from Jazz-based sources,” said Himmatraopet.
In the world of software development, 24X7 collaboration
with specialized teams around the globe is required so that one can pick up
from wherever and whenever the previous team in the chain left off. Bluegrass
is a solution that aims to improve the way in which employees across an organization
collaborate in a globally integrated enterprise. Virtual worlds can help software
development teams break down the barriers raised by globalization. With Bluegrass,
IBM has opened up its development platform based on Web 2.0 technologies for
developers to collaborate and contribute to software under development by logging
onto www.Jazz.net, which is an open, commercial community designed to help companies
globally and transparently collaborate on the development of Jazz-based technology,”
he added.
According to Himmatraopet, the Bluegrass project hopes to combine software development
with virtual worlds, adding 3D functionality. However, it does not move people’s
collaborative applications into the virtual world. Instead, it takes artifacts
from these applications, such as bug reports or work activities and represents
them in the virtual world. It is an attempt to break communication barriers
so that people have greater visibility into the presence and work of others
on a distributed team. “It supports brainstorming with simple creation
of objects in the world without requiring heavy 3D modeling. It should be of
use for younger workers who are more accustomed to virtualization and Web 2.0-style
communications,” said Himmatraopet. Additionally, it also enables people
to create artifacts among a host of collaborative applications.
| Jazz is IBM Rational's new technology
platform for collaborative software delivery. Uniquely attuned to global
and distributed teams, the Jazz platform is designed to transform how people
work together to build software-making software delivery more collaborative,
productive and transparent.
What sets Jazz apart?
Imagine you are part of global team of developers
with offices in multiple countries spanning several time zones. Alternatively,
say you are part of a small, local team divided by differing work schedules
or department affiliations. In either case, you collaborate with business
analysts, architects, developers, testers, lawyers, business stakeholders
with experts separated by time, distance or organization. What type of
infrastructure would help you do your best work, both individually and
as a team? IBM has designed the Jazz technology platform to answer these
needs. Products built on the Jazz platform will help team members to:
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| Collaborate in context |
Jazz technology tracks and manages the relationships
between artifacts, promotes sound development processes, and gathers project
information automatically and unobtrusively to deliver unprecedented lifecycle
integration. |
| Right-size governance |
The Jazz platform empowers teams to capture, share
and automate best practices at varying degrees of rigor. You can easily
fine-tune your governance process over time-avoiding the need to define
everything up front. You can also vary process flexibility over the lifespan
of a project to promote early-stage experimentation and late-stage stabilization.
Built-in process awareness and automation makes it easy for both individuals
and teams. |
| Deliver productivity from day one |
.IBM has designed the Jazz platform
to facilitate straightforward set up and dynamic provisioning of new team
members and projects. Once teams and projects are set up, you can easily
plan iterations, balance workloads, and dynamically modify the team's collective
work stream. This streamlined onboarding provides organizations with the
flexibility they need to respond more quickly to business needs, wherever
it is located. |
| Choose your own path |
Jazz technology builds on open Web and OSGi standards.
IBM has designed it to be open and extensible to give you the flexibility
to assemble your own software delivery platform, relying on your preferred
vendors and solutions. Jazz works with a broad range of clients. It has
an open middleware interface, which means you will be able to install Jazz-based
products using open source middleware, such as Tomcat, Derby, and Jabber;
commercial middleware from IBM WebSphere, DB2 and Lotus; or even third-party
product, Oracle. |
Significance and impact on business
Project Bluegrass aims at solving the digital divide in the workforce that integrates
three key factors in motivating workers—collaboration, communication and
visualization. Bluegrass provides a workspace full of stimulation with instant
messaging, presence awareness, and project tasking that appeal to Generation
Y, also known as millennials. “It will foster partnership and greater innovation
amongst the workforce that is adapting to change in the global economy, which
is vital to the growth of a company and to the development of future leaders.
It also provides the ability to integrate technologies with current IBM technology
that baby boomers and generation X are comfortable with,” pointed out Himmatraopet.
The company’s Rational Team Concert Express will help small and mid-sized
development teams to raise their productivity levels significantly by enabling
real-time collaboration across a geographically dispersed software delivery
team. It includes Web dashboards to help users see real-time status data including
the status of work items and project health. Users also can leverage a broader
set of underlying infrastructure, including Oracle databases, Lotus Sametime
communications software, and Apache servers. “The Rational Team Concert
Express is the first Jazz-infused offering in a new family of development servers
being developed by IBM. Over the next several years, most of the IBM Rational
portfolio will evolve to incorporate Jazz technology to improve team collaboration.
This will provide both new and existing IBM customers a flexible on-ramp to
the Jazz platform of the future,” said Himmatraopet.
| Capability |
Function |
Benefit |
| Team awareness & automation |
Team members can see who else is logged in, what
they are working on, and would automatically be notified of changes. |
Helps teams to collaborate directly in the context
of the work they are doing, especially in globally or organizationally distributed
environments |
| Collaboration features |
Provides project-integrated presence
and messaging-including chat and blogs |
Improves team cohesion, especially for global or
distributed teams, by making it easy to share project documents, collaborate
in real time and get quick answers to ad-hoc questions |
| Extensible client and server infrastructure |
Both the Jazz platform client and
server are based on open Web standards and are designed to be extended with
additional plugins |
It extends the benefits of team collaboration to
a broad range of business and technology users that who can share team documents
using an array of client options. It increases your flexibility in adding
commercial and open source products to your software delivery platform |
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Source: IBM
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Social networking @work
The older members of any workforce possess considerable professional knowledge
and the flow of information needs to percolate down to future generations. The
Jazz offerings will adapt to the way in which users want to use them instead
of users having to adapt to the products. Jazz products are a central repository
to store information about different software development projects. “It
is mainly geared at the young software developers who can work together with
different people spread across different locations on a Web 2.0-style communications
platform to deliver results right on time for IBM and other companies,”
added Himmatraopet.
But then how is different from similar platforms such as Orkut, LinkedIn, blogs
or Facebook?
Most social networking sites try to expand a person’s social life. Project
Bluegrass illustrates the future of work wherein global integration is affecting
companies to collaborate across time zones and cultures and locate operations,
functions and leadership anywhere in the world, based on the right skills and
business environment. It is an easy and effective way to make more money where
you can discuss business ideas, allowing you to gain experience. “Bluegrass
is aimed at using virtual worlds such as Second Life to help software developer’s
work and come up with innovative ideas with one another using interactive visual
representations of ideas, data from the Web and Jazz-based sources which boosts
exposure and brings about information exchange,” viewed Himmatraopet.
Project Bluegrass will enable teams to develop agile development techniques
and collaborate across the globe, gauging the health, status, and information
of different projects. It is an easy technology, as you simply have to just
pick up, use, and extend on your own knowledge.
priyanka.akhouri@expressindia.com
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