SharePoint & Lotus

 I have met several IT executives leading Notes shops telling me that they have selected Lotus Connections as their social software platform and Microsoft SharePoint for document collaboration. Their motivation is quite straightforward: as Office users, SharePoint is a natural Office server for document collaboration however they prefer Lotus Connections over SharePoint 2010 for its social features  e.g. Activities, bookmarks sharing. But is this a sound, long-term strategy? 

A minor update to Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes has been released. SharePoint Integrator v2.0.2 introduces support for the latest Lotus Notes clients: v7.0.4 and v8.5.1. SharePoint Integrator was tested on Windows 7, although we still wait for Lotus Notes to officially support Microsoft’s latest operating system.
 

Some months back, I posted our plans to add enterprise social features to the software delivery process. Today, I am showing you a screencast of our progress on integrating IBM Lotus Connections with IBM Rational Jazz.

The video below shows you how Jazz users have direct access to forums, wikis, blogs, file sharing, and bookmark sharing, from within the Rational Team Concert web interface.

If you’ve been trying to find a path to make your document collaboration and project management more efficient, you’ll want to read this whitepaper. It gives you details about integrating SharePoint with your email client to encourage SharePoint adoption for Lotus Notes users.

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.

As Nicholas Hoover describes in his recent InformationWeek article, Mainsoft Enables Collaboration via SharePoint, Lotus Quickr:
"Technologies for collaborative software development are nothing new, as IBM Rational Team Concert and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System can attest. Those technologies, however, leave a gap between developers and business employees and managers, often causing software development to proceed slower than desired or results that don't meet business demands."

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.

Aside from catching a nasty cold in Orlando, I thoroughly enjoyed Lotusphere 2009. We met with a ton of Lotus customers interested in accessing SharePoint document libraries from Lotus Notes -- despite IBM’s refusal to utter the word SharePoint during the keynote.

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.

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.