SharePoint & Lotus

An  IT executive in a large Notes shop referred me to this comprehensive Forrester study from Ted Schadler about the real cost of corporate email. Ted and his team surveyed 53 IT executives in charge of corporate emails and concluded that the fully loaded costs for corporate email is as high as $480 per user per year for a mobile executive or $334  per year for an information worker in a 15,000 users company.

We have seen a lot of companies this year taking SharePoint to an enterprise-wide level. It's not anymore just a departmental initiative using WSS, but central IT driving the adoption of MOSS to increase collaboration and document sharing across the enterprise.

Today, during Mainsoft’s virtual user group meeting, Yaacov Cohen, Mainsoft’s CEO, and Jonas Martinsson, a Mainsoft product manager:

In the current economic climate, cool technology, innovation and brilliant ideas are simply not enough! The IT executives are being required by their colleagues in finance to show a clear financial justification for every IT initiative. So how do you measure better collaboration and better team productivity? This has been the topic of a number of sessions we recently had with IT executives at customer sites. Here are two approaches to define success metrics for your SharePoint or your collaboration software initiative:

Just back from a week at Rational Software Conference in Orlando. It was remarkable meeting so many IBM customers that want to integrate Microsoft SharePoint into their Jazz-based software delivery platform.

Enterprise social networking features will be added to the Rational Team Concert (RTC) development environment in our next release of Document Collaboration for Rational Jazz, as mentioned on SPTechBlog. With the announced version 2.0 of Document Collaboration, the RTC client will be capable of:

Calendar has rapidly become a business-critical application as we all try to manage our time and our life balancing between multiple teams, family and community commitments. Many enterprises are already using SharePoint Team Calendars to manage events such as sales meetings and team calendars. Team collaboration requires team-aware calendaring so your schedule fits with your team’s schedule. This is a key requirement for our Notes-SharePoint customers.

Last week in New York City, we had our quarterly meeting of sales executives. We spent time analyzing customer requirements, and here are some key take-aways:

During today’s meeting, Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen addressed common use cases for integrating SharePoint and Lotus Notes, including remote document authoring and sharing; complying with regulations and statutes; and saving email storage costs.

I was talking with an IT executive in charge of collaboration in a Fortune 100 company. Surprise, surprise their main strategic initiative is to reduce IT costs for their 2010 budget so they are agressively rolling out Notes 8.5 to take advantage of the new DAOS technology .