What Office 2010 means for Lotus Notes shops?
There are a number of nice collaboration features in the Office 2010 Technical Preview. Check out the co-authoring, presence awareness, and file sharing options.
1) Co-authoring: Multiple users can work simultaneously on the same Word document or PowerPoint presentation. If all authors have access to the same SharePoint 2010 server, when you save your document, the changes are made available to the other authors and you also get their changes.
2) Presence awareness across all Office 2010 products: With Microsoft Office Communicator Server 2007 R2 installed, you can click on the presence button to initiate a chat or a voice over IP conversation.
3) File Sharing: With all users having access to a SharePoint 2010 server, you can share a PowerPoint slide show without emailing the huge PowerPoint file by simply sending a URL to other users.
These collaboration features require SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office Communication Server, so SharePoint is now a central piece of Office 2010. In fact, there is even a new Office product, the SharePoint 2010 workspace, which is the renamed Groove product, providing off-line access to SharePoint.
This means that every enterprise using Office 2010 will end-up using SharePoint 2010 as SharePoint is now a central piece of Office. That's clearly Microsoft strategy: an all or nothing value proposition.
Our objective, at Mainsoft, is to deliver a fully integrated collaboration suite accross Office 2010, which includes SharePoint, Lotus Notes, and Lotus Sametime. So you can use Sametime presence awareness from the Office 2010 applications, you can drag-and-drop documents from Notes emails to SharePoint, and you can share SharePoint calendars from Notes. You can even take a Notes email with multiple attachements and share it on a SharePoint server where it will be accessible through a simple browser.
So you can pick and choose your favorite products from Lotus and Microsoft or other vendors and preserve your freedom of choice.
How far are you from that objective?
"Our objective, at Mainsoft, is to deliver a fully integrated collaboration suite accross Office 2010, which includes SharePoint, Lotus Notes, and Lotus Sametime."
That is very interesting to be able to make these 2 platforms interoperate. How far are you of delivering a product?
I have found a mean to integrate OCS presence awareness within WS Portal and Lotus Connections, but not the other way...
What has any of that got to do with the Notes community?
This post is a pretty thinly disguised piece of advertising for Mainsoft.
"You can even take a Notes email with multiple attachements and share it on a SharePoint server where it will be accessible through a simple browser."
Gee... if only Notes could do that
Advertising is fine, but to pretend that it is neutral commentary/blog post shows a high level of contempt for your readers.
I appreciate the honest
I appreciate the honest feedback. Please let me try to clarify:
1) As the vast majority of the Notes community will sooner or later upgrade to Office 2010. SharePoint became integrated within Office as described in the post. Notes shops should know about it ... if they upgrade, they have to deal with SharePoint. if they don't want SharePoint, they should be really careful about their adoption of Office 2010 to avoid usage of Office features which requires SharePoint or Office Communication Server.
2) with Mainsoft, you can drag-and-drop and email with multiple attachments into a SharePoint document library, it will appear on SharePoint as an EML file, which is a standard HTML format, so this email is now shared and accessible even from a browser. So this is not something you can do with Notes, not even using Quickr and its connector. BTW, that's not something you can do from Outlook either.
I hope this helps.
Hmm, I can drag my body only
Hmm, I can drag my body only and email with attachments emails as .emls into Quickr. With the right set up, Notes can read eml files.
Notes can even view any iCal formatted url in the calendar, as well.
Interesting...
The last time I checked Quickr I was only able to save attachments there. It's a very good thing that Quickr has finally decided to support .eml. It only proves the fact that there's a great demand for the ability to drag-n-drop e-mails to document repositories. It also proves that the way we implemented the feature (.eml format) is the right way to go.
I'm not familiar with the way to setup Notes to open .eml files. It simply cannot be done. We worked hard (sometimes together with IBM) to be able to convert .eml files to Notes documents. We maintain full NotesRTF fidelity: the SharePoint e-mails opened in Notes look exactly the same as the original e-mails (including sections, document links, etc...).
Personally, I don't have anything against the IBM stack. I think Notes (based on Expeditor), Quickr and Connections are great applications. Mainsoft helps a lot of people who have a heterogenous enviroment to get the max out of this enviroment and really collaborate using their existing assets, while maintating their freedom of choice.