SharePoint & Lotus

Last week, Mainsoft welcomed Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at Forrester Research to speak with more than 150 Lotus customers that have adopted Microsoft SharePoint and want to promote end user adoption by integrating it with email.

Today, at the Lotusphere 2010 conference in Orlando, Mainsoft announced the upcoming 2.5 release of SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes. The 2.5 release will pack some exciting new features, bound to turn heads. Read this post to find out the contents of the release and watch the video showing off some of the upcoming social features.

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.
 

According to a recent study conducted by Infotrends, SharePoint adoption falls far short of SharePoint deployment. Today, of the 62.2% of employees who now have access to SharePoint, only 23.8% access it at least once daily. 

Collaboration is a top IT priority and the key to enabling people to increase the effectiveness of their work while reducing the time, cost, and effort spent working together. But how can you drive mainstream user adoption of Microsoft SharePoint when your users are committed to using Lotus Notes?

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.
 

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.

Today, during Mainsoft’s virtual user group meeting, Yaacov Cohen, Mainsoft’s CEO, and Jonas Martinsson, a Mainsoft product manager, highlighted SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes v 2.0.

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.