SharePoint & Lotus

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.

From a Product Management perspective, the Outlook version requires some subtle design changes compared to Lotus Notes. In addition to tweaking icons and colors to match the target platform, the main differences are:

The Outlook client lacks the native sidebar architecture of Lotus Notes. To add the sidebar to Outlook required a significant development effort, compared to how simple this step was in Lotus Notes. The SharePoint sidebar in Outlook now lives beside the To Do Bar and mimics its behavior. The sidebar can be made visible, minimized, or hidden.

Outlook uses multiple windows for messages and even supports multiple main application windows, while Lotus Notes uses multiple tabs inside the same window. To boost user productivity, we allow the user to open a SharePoint sidebar in each Outlook window. This decision forced us to deal with synchronization of the document list when many open sidebars exist. An upside to having the sidebar in the message window is that it is now very easy to select the current location when replacing attachments with links.

The Outlook message window uses the new ribbon UI found in many of the Office 2007 products (and in the entire Office 2010 suite). The ribbon UI makes it that much easier to present product features in Outlook. The Replace attachments with SharePoint links function is available out-of-the-box through Outlook’s ribbon UI, while Notes users (or their administrator) need to update the mail template. Another upside of the ribbon UI is that it defines standard GUI elements, such as the small arrow in the lower right corner of the group to set the preferences.

The following 3-minute video shows an early version of the Outlook product. A public beta release is scheduled for mid-October.

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