SharePoint & Lotus

As Susan and I continue our journey throughout Germany and England, with two Lotusphere events and multiple customer visits, we keep learning more about large Notes users and how they cope with the economic storm. The good news is that people get really creative when they have no choice!

During tough times, people need to work better together and collaboration is a key factor to increase operating efficiencies and to drive costs down. This includes collaboration with key business partners outside your Intranet. But rather than building a new large partner portal site and migrating partner contents to the new site, a more cost-effective alternative is to connect to existing partner's team sites.
 
A typical use case  is to manage a joint project, to share documents, calendars, news, forums, and tasks accross different companies. This means that a Notes shop needs to connect to multiple partners' SharePoint sites. Here are some of the issues that require resolution for an effective solution:
 
1. Authentication: You do not control the authentication schema of these sites: different partners' sites might be using different authentication infrastructure: Kerberos, Basic Authentication, NTLM, or form-based authentication. You also need each partner to add your users in its Active Directory.
 
2. Connectivity: You  might need to get through a proxy server and/or through a VPN, which are not always friendly to TCP/IP traffic.
 
3. User Interface: How do you easily navigate multiple sites and rapidly find the folder you have been looking for and how do you move documents accross multiple sites?
 
4. Presence Awareness: What if you use Lotus Sametime but your partner uses Microsoft Office Communication Server (MOCS)?
 
The good news is that we had to solve these issues with the SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes and we learned, last year, through a long process working with beta sites how to come-up with the solutions. Today, the SharePoint Integrator version 1.5 recongnizes the partner authentication schema and supports the four options mentioned above. For connectivity, the Integrator uses, as default, the Internet Explorer settings so it gets through proxy server and VPN as IE does. For the user interface, first we enable central provisioning of a long list of SharePoint sites through the Domino policy-based administration. Users can also add their own sites. The SharePoint Documents sidebar within Notes includes: a Favorites button so you can save your frequently visited locations, a History button to previous locations, and a Search button to search SharePoint sites from within Notes. You can take a look at this demo to get a better sense.
 
For the Presence Awareness, there is a Lotus SameTime Gateway and we expect everyday now, the latest update, which will add MOCS support as announced by IBM and Microsoft in November of last year.
 
So don't let the economic news take you down ! There are plenty of creative ways to increase collaboration within and outside your company.