SharePoint & Lotus

Last week, Mainsoft welcomed Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at Forrester Research to speak with more than 150 Lotus customers that have adopted Microsoft SharePoint and want to promote end user adoption by integrating it with email.

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. 

Eric Lai from ComputerWorld came out with a great article including seven ways to cut software costs during the economic downturn, SharePoint-Notes coexistence is number 6. Take a look, here. Migrating a Notes shop to Outlook and Exchange is expensive, in particular if you have to migrate Domino and Notes applications.

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.”