SharePoint & Lotus

Calendar has rapidly become a business-critical application as we all try to manage our time and our life balancing between multiple teams, family and community commitments. Many enterprises are already using SharePoint Team Calendars to manage events such as sales meetings and team calendars. Team collaboration requires team-aware calendaring so your schedule fits with your team’s schedule. This is a key requirement for our Notes-SharePoint customers.

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:

During today’s meeting, Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen addressed common use cases for integrating SharePoint and Lotus Notes, including remote document authoring and sharing; complying with regulations and statutes; and saving email storage costs.

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 .

At 1:00 pm EDT, Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen will present common use cases for integrating SharePoint and Lotus Notes, including remote document authoring and archiving Lotus Notes emails on SharePoint. Jonas Martinsson, a Mainsoft product manager, will demo Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes software, which enables users to access, modify, and publish Lotus Notes emails and attachments on SharePoint from a Lotus Notes sidebar.

The second Preview release of Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes 2.0 is now available! This new release, which integrates with Lotus Notes 8.5 Standard Configuration, lets you embed SharePoint calendars in Notes. You will now be able to create, edit and remove SharePoint events in the same way as you work with Notes calendar items.

Champion Solutions Group is a premier technology solutions provider and long-time Lotus Notes/Domino customer. Recently, the company completed an enterprise-wide MOSS deployment in order to deliver a portal that provides Web-based document management, team sites, and integration with back-end Microsoft SQL-based applications. The company is deploying Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator to integrate SharePoint with Lotus Notes 8.0.2.

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.

Recently, our product team sat down with Mainsoft customer Federic Guinet, IT Director at the French Banking Federation (FBF). The organization represents 450 commercial, cooperative, and mutual banks operating in France, and it's recently been in the news for work on measures to ease lending conditions for consumers/small businesses, banking guidelines (e.g. rules on trader bonuses) in exchange for state funding, and responses to other banking policies and regulations.

Today, we have our first Virtual User Group meeting. We have had numerous Web Seminars during the past years but this is the first time we exclusively invited our SharePoint Integrator customers and prospects who have been using the product. We plan to do this at least once a quarter to share latest case studies, best practices, and product releases. Today, we have more than 125 registered participants!