SharePoint & Lotus

Some months back, I posted our plans to add enterprise social features to the software delivery process. Today, I am showing you a screencast of our progress on integrating IBM Lotus Connections with IBM Rational Jazz.

The video below shows you how Jazz users have direct access to forums, wikis, blogs, file sharing, and bookmark sharing, from within the Rational Team Concert web interface.

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:

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:

The second Preview release of Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes 2.0 is now available! This new release, which integrates with Lotus Notes 8.5 Standard Configuration, lets you embed SharePoint calendars in Notes. You will now be able to create, edit and remove SharePoint events in the same way as you work with Notes calendar items.

As Nicholas Hoover describes in his recent InformationWeek article, Mainsoft Enables Collaboration via SharePoint, Lotus Quickr:
"Technologies for collaborative software development are nothing new, as IBM Rational Team Concert and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System can attest. Those technologies, however, leave a gap between developers and business employees and managers, often causing software development to proceed slower than desired or results that don't meet business demands."

The other day, I came across ZDNet’s in-depth coverage of Gartner’s Fall Symposium, in which Larry Dignan shared the insights and pearls of wisdom that Gartner advised CIOs attending the conference. At that time, Gartner reported that CIOs are cleaning house, eliminating projects that don’t deliver immediate value, and investing strategically in technologies like Collaboration and Social Networking that transform the way business gets done, reduce cost structures, and can possibly be implemented inexpensively.