SharePoint & Lotus

Today, at the Lotusphere 2010 conference in Orlando, Mainsoft announced the upcoming 2.5 release of SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes. The 2.5 release will pack some exciting new features, bound to turn heads. Read this post to find out the contents of the release and watch the video showing off some of the upcoming social features.

SharePoint 2010, also scheduled for release by Microsoft during H1 2010, will be fully supported. A significant addition in this SharePoint release is the greatly improved social features that empower people to work together in new ways. SharePoint Integrator 2.5 hooks into these features by offering tagging and tag clouds, document comments on the note board, document ratings, and more, from within Lotus Notes.

No matter if your are using MOSS2007 or plan to roll out SharePoint 2010, you will get support for many new social features, connected to SharePoint user profiles. These features bring additional value to profiles, which are often synced with corporate directories and human resources databases. Hovering a Notes username pops up a business card with SharePoint user profile details. The business card also provides access to the user’s shared documents in the sidebar. You can find SharePoint users directly from the Search Bar in Notes and access your own and others’ My Sites with the click of a button. I recorded a video below to show you these features in action.

The improved search feature helps you to find documents and people by metadata. The search is simplified by a graphical Search Assistant, which makes it easy to locate the information you need. The tag cloud helps you to locate items when searching SharePoint 2010 sites.

An oft requested feature is SharePoint Views support. I am happy to announce that the views defined on SharePoint will be available in Notes, using SharePoint Integrator 2.5. No matter how your documents are filtered, and by which columns they are sorted and shown, you will have the option to use those views in the sidebar.

On top of this, there are a slew of usability improvements which will be incorporated into the upcoming release, streamlining the user experience even more. Most notable are improvements to the Properties Pane and Favorites.

The beta version will become available during Q1, and the full release in Q2 2010.

Watch this video in higher resolution here.