What is HCL’s Project Yuzu?

I’m sure we are all familiar with this situation: Your company runs a solution for collaboration. It can be combination of SharePoint, Teams, Yammer and Microsoft 365, it can be HCL Connections, Notes, Sametime or it can be a combination of HCL tools and Microsoft tools (yes, they do integrate). What these solutions have in common is that it’s at times easy to keep track of your stuff. Where is the latest version of this file? Is it in a chat, is it on OneDrive, is it in this community? Where is the chat history? In what team did we have this task assignment tool? In short: It gets hard to keep track of all your chats, project rooms, files and information.  HCL is now working on a concept that aims to solve this problem.

The concept is called The Digital Office, and they’ve named the project Project Yuzu. The idea is to have a consistent workspace for teams of people to get their work done, without losing context. Think of it as a physical meeting space, or video meeting, on steroids.

The idea is to evolve HCL Sametime from being something that is much more than a tool for chats and video meetings. Here’s an illustration that can enlighten you a bit more about this subject:

 

The idea is that you do still have your horizon, even if everything is clouded by too much information. In the horizon, you would be able to see all the content that you need for the context you are in right now. Let’s say you are working on a specific project. You would then see the exact chats, files, presentations and all other contents that you would need right now. Instead of having to look around for it. But in the control panel in the cockpit, you would see an overview over all your projects. So in that way, you would have a complete and clear vision on how to work and bring all your tools together.

Here are some examples on use cases to give you a further idea what this is all about:

 

So a project manager can set up a virtual space for a project. The team then use it to coordinate their entire working process to get the job done. And via the overview control panel, you will have a complete view of all your projects. And it doesn’t matter if the contents of these projects are inside Connections, SharePoint, Teams, Sametime, Notes, Outlook or even third party apps that can be integrated.

Here’s an example, where a software company has a problem with getting a product shipped out the door:

 

Carl, the product owner, then sets up a Digital Office for his team:

 

Everybody involved in the project is there. But this is not just a meeting. It’s the first step of a persistent digital office. People can collaborate on contents, share, chat, talk and so on. But it won’t disappear with this meeting has ended. It will stay in the digital office. Which means that in between meetings, when the work is being done, they can go back to this digital office, and find contents, add contens, post updates, chat and so on. So a single meeting has now turned into a persistent digital office, where everything is organised and you can easily find what you need:

 

Of course, this doesn’t just give you an overview. You can also click to see things in detail. Here one user has clicked on the Activities Kanban board:

 

He can then return to the overall overview of this project:

 

While the Kanban board is a part of HCL’s portfolio, in addition to all the other applications that will be delivered by HCL, the Digital Office offers an open ecosystem.  As you can se in the illustration above, you can integrate any open ended platforms and systems, like SalesForce, Jira, Microsoft 365, Notes/Domino and so on. You can even set up your own low code applications, like Domino Volt, and integrate them.

In the picture above, you can also see a section called Mobile Device order. That is a Domino Volt app for ordering cellphones, and it can be added to this project, and be set up to show all orders for this particular project. If you added it to another Digital Office project, it would show the orders for that project. So integration and expandability is a key to the Digital Office.

This is the architecture that makes it all possible:

 

This architecture makes it possible for you to work on your projects, and have full control, without worrying about where files, resources, tasks and so on are located. You can just go ahead with your work.

The solution will be able to run both on prem (meaning locally on your own servers if you have a company policy against going into the cloud), with a hosting provider or in a cloud based solution. In addition there will be integration with Domino, Connections, your calendar and email solutions and via the ecosystem you can integrate other solutions.

Here is the road map for Project Yuzu:

 

As you can see it takes its cue from HCL Sametime, but it will also be additions along the way, in small drips, that will lead us to the Digital Office that HCL envisions with Project Yuzu.

So to sum up:

• This will make employees feel they are part of a team, even if they are working remotely
• It’s fast and easy to get started, everything will be included, you don’t need to add things manually or do any heavy lifting yourself
• It’s Cloud native: You decide where to deploy it

Here is a video giving a walk through of Project Yuzu:

 

What do you guys think? Let us know in the comments!