SharePoint & Lotus

Barb Mosher, pointedly asked in a recent CMS Wire article, if CMIS  will kill the Content Connector Industry. CMIS is the interoperability initiative from Microsoft, IBM and other vendors to come up with a vendor-neutrol web services interface to enable different Content Management systems coming from different vendors to talk to each other. 

I got this question yesterday from a senior analyst at one of the leading IT analyst firms during one of our periodic briefings. His point was: Notes and SharePoint are coming from two competitive collaboration vendors: IBM and Microsoft. Why keep both competitive offerings in the same shop? Wouldn't it make more sense to allign with a single vendor?  

Composite applications in Lotus Notes 8, aka business mashups, allow organizations to make use of their current applications and systems in a way that is very easy to use. Organizations that create Notes business mashups really help their employees and improve their effectiveness. Employees stop losing valuable time switching between applications, searching for associated content, and copying and pasting information. Now, they are able to access relevant information from multiple systems in one integrated view, helping to simplify their work process.
 
Notes composite applications can include applications built with many different programming languages, including Lotus Notes applications (Domino), Java client applications and Microsoft .NET applications, amongst others. To better understand the ideas behind business mashups, I recommend you take a look at this Smart Assist demo from IBM.
 
However, no real-world composite app will ever be complete without documents integration.
If an organization uses SharePoint for document management, what can be more natural than integrating SharePoint documents into its business mashups?

In a recent post on this blog, Jonas shared with us his team's latest progress on SharePoint calendar federation in Notes. Here is a real use case:
 
I have been working on our next sales meeting agenda, which takes place next week. I created  a meeting workspace for our sales meeting on our SharePoint site, added a calendar web part and created all the calendar events. Naturally, I want to enable our team members to be able to see the sales meeting calendar from their Notes client calendar.

One of the themes, which consistently comes up when meeting customers using our latest SharePoint Integrator version 1.5, is the business use cases for saving Notes emails in SharePoint. It became common wisdom that we are sending and receiving far too many emails and that there are better ways to collaborate and share information than inflating the Inbox of your colleagues, customers, and board members.

For a while, I have been thinking we need to start a blog about Lotus Notes, SharePoint and how to make them work together. But it is only after my last couple of business trips, visiting customers on the East Coast and in Germany, that I finally sat down and started writing.
 
A lot has been said about the current economic downturn. We’ve all heard about mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, and what we as individuals need to do to cope with the recession – probably more than we wanted to. But very little has been said about how IT organizations in general and Notes shops in particular can survive the recession and emerge even stronger. From recent discussions with dozens of IT executives, one consistent theme has become crystal-clear: migrating from Notes/Domino to Outlook/Exchange is not the smartest thing to do in this economy. In a migration, you start with one email and messaging system, and, several million dollars or Euro later, you get another one that does pretty much the same thing!