SharePoint & Lotus

With the economy picking-up, the majority of Notes enterprises are finally upgrading to Notes 8.0.2 or Notes 8.5 and, at the same time, rolling-out SharePoint to their enterprise users to improve collaboration. While these changes are a refreshing and welcomed upgrade for the IT professional; for the average enterprise user, they are a disruptive and scary change. Notes 8 introduces a totally different user interface, and SharePoint requires users to change their daily behaviour.  So how can central IT promote and execute this roll-out ?
 

1. The piecemeal approach:
 
This is the traditional approach. First you roll-out, let's say, Notes 8, and then train your end users on how to use the new user interface. Next, you roll-out SharePoint and then train your end-users about document sharing and concurrent access, check-in, check out and versioning, required properties, and so on. That's a lot of work and long hours for you and your team. The frustrated end-users, that are overwhelmed by all the changes, are telling you that they actually prefer the old-fashion way of collaborating on documents by sending them as emails attachements. They simply don't see how all this new stuff is making their job any easier!
 
2. The integrated approach:
 
A better approach is to focus on making  the end-users' jobs easier rather than focusing on the technology! First, segment your end users according to their day-to-day jobs, then analyze the business workflow of each segment, and map this business workflow to a Notes-SharePoint step-by-step integrated workflow. This way, you can deliver user-centric training. Each group of users gets a clear sense of how their worklife will be improved using the new desktop rather than listening to a laundry list of features and some fancy new concepts which may or may not apply to their daily work.
 
We look at Notes-SharePoint as ONE integrated collaboration system using the SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes, this enables us to work with our customers to define integrated workflows across Notes emails and SharePoint documents and across Notes and SharePoint calendars.
 
This user-centric approach helps IT return to the basics: helping people to get their jobs done faster and better!