SharePoint & Lotus

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?

 
For that reason exactly, we at Mainsoft extended our SharePoint Documents sidebar in order for it to be a business mashup component. The fact that Notes 8.5 extended its composite support to allow sidebars to participate in the mashup game, really helped implement our vision. Now organizations can create mashups with documents using the plain old SharePoint Documents sidebar. Take a look at the following example. This is a screenshot of a 'Customer Interests' composite application.
 

 
The application was originally composed of 3 components:
* Notes contacts list - displaying a list of customers in the standard Notes contacts app.
* Domino forum application - displaying all customers’ posts in a basic Domino forum app.
* Tag Cloud - an Eclipse component displaying customers’ topics of interest.
 
When you select a customer from the customer list, all the data in Notes is updated based upon the selection: the forum app displays the posts submitted by the selected customer, and the tag cloud displays the selected customer topics of interest.
 
We added the SharePoint Documents sidebar to this composite app. Now, when a customer is selected, the SharePoint sidebar is also automatically updated, displaying the documents relating to the selected user. For example, in the attached screenshot, when Frank Adams was selected, the SharePoint Documents sidebar was updated to display only the documents created by Frank Adams.
 
There are endless possibilities of integrating SharePoint documents into business mashups. For example, consider an HR application that displays the relevant employees’ paperwork when browsing through e-mails. Or, a sales call center app -  when a customer calls, relevant brochures containing offers to the calling customer are automatically displayed in a sidebar.
 
It all comes down to the specific needs of the organization. But, if you have valuable information hidden in your SharePoint document libraries - you need to do everything you can in order to help your employees to discover it. Notes 8/8.5 business mashups are a great way to do it.
 
At Lotusphere 2009, Mainsoft will be hosting  a Bird-of-Feather session (BOF212), on Wednesday at 7:00am, s where with a live demo of SharePoint documents participating in business mashups will be shown. Be sure to be there!