SharePoint & Lotus

Prominent technology scholars have recently been debating the contribution of the Internet to our society. For Nicholas Carr, the Web with its searches, constant interruptions, and hyperlinks is diminishing “our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection, and introspection. The Web never encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental locomotion.

 I have met several IT executives leading Notes shops telling me that they have selected Lotus Connections as their social software platform and Microsoft SharePoint for document collaboration. Their motivation is quite straightforward: as Office users, SharePoint is a natural Office server for document collaboration however they prefer Lotus Connections over SharePoint 2010 for its social features  e.g. Activities, bookmarks sharing. But is this a sound, long-term strategy? 

With the economy picking-up, the majority of Notes enterprises are finally upgrading to Notes 8.0.2 or Notes 8.5 and, at the same time, rolling-out SharePoint to their enterprise users to improve collaboration. While these changes are a refreshing and welcomed upgrade for the IT professional; for the average enterprise user, they are a disruptive and scary change. Notes 8 introduces a totally different user interface, and SharePoint requires users to change their daily behaviour.  So how can central IT promote and execute this roll-out ?
 

For many companies, social networks provide valuable information about employees and their skills. This information is increasingly used by organizations to facilitate collaboration and build effective teams.
 

There are a number of nice collaboration features in the Office 2010 Technical Preview. Check out the co-authoring, presence awareness, and file sharing options.
 

I sat down with Bruce Elgort for an interview about our new version on The Taking Notes Podcast. As usual, I spoke too much, but hopefully this can still be helpful. You can listen to it here.

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 company with 15,000 users.

This year, many companies have taken SharePoint to an enterprise-wide level. These initiatives have not been driven at the departmental level using WSS, rather central IT is driving the adoption of MOSS to increase collaboration and document sharing across the enterprise.

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:

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.