The Newest Warfare Tool: CollaborationThe Newest Warfare Tool: Collaboration

With so many of the world's nations united in the antiterrorism campaign dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom, coordinating military efforts is key. Recognizing the importance of collaboration, the U.S. Navy is working with Lotus Software to extend its on-ship collaborative capabilities to British, Canadian, German, and New Zealand forces.

For the past two years, the Navy has been deploying Domino servers and Lotus's Sametime application throughout all of its battle groups and amphibious-ready groups. The software lets dozens of ships share real-time data, such as warfare logistics, weather, and medical data using instant messaging, whiteboarding and application-sharing tools. By accessing an encrypted wireless local area network (via anything from a 64-Kbyte dial-up connection on smaller ships to a T1-equivalent pipe on aircraft carriers), naval personnel can replicate and view mirror images of Web-enabled Domino databases using a Web-browser interface. To maximize bandwidth, the software only replicates data that has changed.

Once the effort to track down Osama bin Laden became a global effort, the Navy demonstrated the technology to allied decision-makers, who were eager to get on board. The Navy set up a separate "coalition network" to ensure the security of its classified data, and Lotus personnel worked with allied forces to equip their ships as quickly as possible. Even now, Lotus technicians are on board allied ships deploying the technology, shoring up an unprecedented collaborative military environment. "We're able to provide more valuable data and circulate that data to allies much faster than in the past," says Martin Jordan, allied interoperability systems engineer for the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command.

Al Zollar, general manager of Lotus Software, alluded to the effort during his keynote at last month's Lotusphere conference as an example of rapid deployment of collaborative technologies. To that end, Jordan says it took a team of six people just 42 days to equip the first U.S. battle group nearly two years ago, and allied deployments have been happening even faster. Naval personnel apparently took to the technology just as quickly, particularly Sametime's chat tool. Says Jordan, "They found ways of using it that we hadn't even thought of."