SharePoint & Lotus

In a sharp contrast to Google, Microsoft and IBM Lotus have both offered a software-plus-services approach to their cloud offerings. Personal Information Managers (Outlook or Notes) running on local desktops (that's the "software" piece) are accessing hosted "services" over the cloud: Microsoft SharePoint Online or IBM Lotus Live.

 
We looked at both offerings and were not surprised to learn that the IBM and Microsoft clouds lack even a basic level of interoperability.
 
For example, a Notes user cannot drag-n-drop a document received as an attachment into SharePoint Online. Instead, the user needs to save the document on the local file system, open a browser, log-on to SharePoint Online and upload the document.
 
I talked to IT executives who are looking at enterprise-wide adoption of hosted services and they had not yet taken into account the interoperability issue. This lack of interoperability will inevitably lead to productivity losses and increasing operating costs, which are the exact problems that cloud computing is supposed to solve.
 
So we decided to add cloud support to our SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes to bring interoperability to the clouds. We gathered business requirements to build an effective solution:
 

• No installation required on SharePoint! As Shawn Shell pointed out in a CMS Wire's article, it is not clear if you will be able to get Microsoft to install third-party software on SharePoint Online, even if you got a dedicated server. And we're not even talking about when you are sharing a server.
• User experience must be preserved despite the fact that the user is accessing the Internet rather that the local drive. So you need, for example, to make sure that the drop part of a drag-n-drop operation from your local disk to the cloud is happening, asyncronously, in the background, and if you don't, your desktop might freeze until the 10MG file has been uploaded!

 
We really need to make the two clouds speak to each other!