SharePoint & Lotus

In the current economic climate, cool technology, innovation and brilliant ideas are simply not enough! The IT executives are being required by their colleagues in finance to show a clear financial justification for every IT initiative. So how do you measure better collaboration and better team productivity? This has been the topic of a number of sessions we recently had with IT executives at customer sites. Here are two approaches to define success metrics for your SharePoint or your collaboration software initiative:

Last week in New York City, we had our quarterly meeting of sales executives. We spent time analyzing customer requirements, and here are some key take-aways:

I was talking with an IT executive in charge of collaboration in a Fortune 100 company. Surprise, surprise their main strategic initiative is to reduce IT costs for their 2010 budget so they are agressively rolling out Notes 8.5 to take advantage of the new DAOS technology .

We just presented our coexistence strategy in two Lotusphere Comes To You events in Munich and Dusseldorf with our German partner: TimeToAct. These were two excellent, well organized events, very well attended by large Lotus customers. We had two great sessions and some in-depth discussions with a number of customers.

Tomorrow at 11:00 AM Eastern (4:00 PM GMT), Mainsoft is presenting a web seminar on integrating SharePoint with Lotus Notes: "Achieving your '09 collaboration objectives while managing expenses".
 
Yaacov Cohen will present how to take advantage of your existing company assets while accelerating SharePoint adoption in today's challenging economy. In the same session, I will show a demo of Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes, highlighting how it promotes team collaboration.

Forty nine percent of firms participating in a recent study by Forrester Research said implementing a collaboration strategy is a priority or a critical priority.  And yet, many Lotus Notes and Domino customers struggle to implement their collaboration strategy because they rely on SharePoint (the back end of Office) for team collaboration and document management.
 
If you’re visiting this blog, you know all too well that accessing/updating/publishing documents and emails on SharePoint is a hassle. And you’ve probably sat through heated debates about migrating from Notes 6.5 or 7.x to a single vendor strategy simply because SharePoint isn’t compatible with Notes.  Think twice if you are considering a migration. According to Ted Koplowitz, principal analyst of Forrester Research,“[B]e careful not to underestimate the cost of recoding those applications for SharePoint — or the disruptive impact on knowledge workers…. In fact, for many, Notes and SharePoint may live side by side for the foreseeable future.”