SharePoint & Lotus

 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? 

We hope you enjoyed yesterday’s popular webinar, with a record-breaking 189 online attendees!

Yaacov Cohen, CEO of Mainsoft, presented the business case of integrating SharePoint with your e-mail application, be it Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook. I also had the opportunity to show a product demo with use-cases of how SharePoint and e-mail go hand-in-hand. At the end there was a lively Q&A session with really great questions from the audience.

developerWorks editor Scott Laningham just posted an interview with Chris Lamb, Senior Marketing Manager for IBM Lotus Connections, and Yaacov Cohen, Mainsoft's CEO.  They talk about the benefits of integrating IBM Lotus Connections with IBM Rational Team Concert to expand communications about software deliveries to include business stakeholders and end users, in addition to technical teams worldwide.
 

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 ?
 

Thought you might be interested in hearing Matt Cain, Gartner’s lead email analyst, talk about integrating email with SharePoint to drive mainstream user adoption in this free podcast.

Right now, one of the hot developments here at Mainsoft is extending the SharePoint Integrator to include Microsoft Outlook. The SharePoint Integrator has been available exclusively for IBM platforms, but will soon support Outlook as well.

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.
 

Do you know that SharePoint Integrator offers usage reports on its own efficiency to help your organization improve collaboration patterns?

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.