SharePoint & Lotus

For many companies, social networks provide valuable information about employees and their skills. This information is increasingly used by organizations to facilitate collaboration and build effective teams.
 

A growing number of enterprises are selecting Lotus Connections or SharePoint My Sites to build their first enterprise social network. Their objective is to build a company-wide directory with rich information about the company employees: skills, interests, reporting structure, blogs, wikis, published documents, and more.
 
These enterprise social networks make it easy to learn more about colleagues and to find the right people for a defined task; they become the gateway to enterprise collaboration as you find out about people and then start collaborating with them. This type of data is particularly useful for large companies with distributed offices and employees working from home.
 
To get your mainstream users to actually take advantage of your enterprise social network, you need to do more than just build it. You need to bring this social information to the users' email client: Notes or Outlook. For example, if you get a calendar invite from a colleague from the other side of the Atlantic and you don't know him personally or professionally, you can easily access his profile. By simply hovering on his name (from the invite or the email), you gain access to his profile, without having to switch to a browser where you risk losing context and end up on a news site wondering what you were looking for!
 
Based on customers' input, we are including these type of features in our upcoming release of the SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes by giving Notes users the ability to access SharePoint Profiles and My Site from Notes.
 
Here is an example. First, I hover over the name of a Notes email recipient and get the SharePoint business card of the user (sorry for the picture):
 
 
Now, I can add his My Site to my registred SharePoint sites within my SharePoint side bar, or I can add him as a Colleague.
 
 
 
I now have additional access to the SharePoint profile when I hover on a document field such as Created By within the SharePoint Integrator sidebar within Notes.
 
You can also search for people directly from Notes. Use the search results to add the person to your Colleague or to add her My Site to your registred sites. Both options give you easy access to the person's My Site from Notes without having to open a browser.
 
 
Pretty Cool. What do you think?