SharePoint & Lotus

The other day, I came across ZDNet’s in-depth coverage of Gartner’s Fall Symposium, in which Larry Dignan shared the insights and pearls of wisdom that Gartner advised CIOs attending the conference. At that time, Gartner reported that CIOs are cleaning house, eliminating projects that don’t deliver immediate value, and investing strategically in technologies like Collaboration and Social Networking that transform the way business gets done, reduce cost structures, and can possibly be implemented inexpensively. 

In a recent post on this blog, Jonas shared with us his team's latest progress on SharePoint calendar federation in Notes. Here is a real use case:
 
I have been working on our next sales meeting agenda, which takes place next week. I created  a meeting workspace for our sales meeting on our SharePoint site, added a calendar web part and created all the calendar events. Naturally, I want to enable our team members to be able to see the sales meeting calendar from their Notes client calendar.

One of the themes, which consistently comes up when meeting customers using our latest SharePoint Integrator version 1.5, is the business use cases for saving Notes emails in SharePoint. It became common wisdom that we are sending and receiving far too many emails and that there are better ways to collaborate and share information than inflating the Inbox of your colleagues, customers, and board members.

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.” 

This week, version 1.5 of Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes was released. But instead of resting on our laurels here at Mainsoft, we’re already hard at work on the next release of the Notes plug-in. I’d like to give you a glimpse of one of the new cool features that’s in the pipeline: Calendar Federation.

For me, the most anticipated new feature in Lotus Notes 8.5 is calendar federation. For example, it allows you to subscribe to external iCal-based calendars and overlay Google calendars inside Notes. The Google Calendar support goes beyond Microsoft Outlook’s offering; Notes 8.5 offers true integration where you can create and edit appointments on Google Calendar from within Notes.

For a while, I have been thinking we need to start a blog about Lotus Notes, SharePoint and how to make them work together. But it is only after my last couple of business trips, visiting customers on the East Coast and in Germany, that I finally sat down and started writing.
 
A lot has been said about the current economic downturn. We’ve all heard about mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, and what we as individuals need to do to cope with the recession – probably more than we wanted to. But very little has been said about how IT organizations in general and Notes shops in particular can survive the recession and emerge even stronger. From recent discussions with dozens of IT executives, one consistent theme has become crystal-clear: migrating from Notes/Domino to Outlook/Exchange is not the smartest thing to do in this economy. In a migration, you start with one email and messaging system, and, several million dollars or Euro later, you get another one that does pretty much the same thing!