Want to get SharePoint but stay on Lotus Notes? Here's how

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint collaboration server software is, by many accounts, a huge hit, providing that seemingly irresistible formula of solid technology for free or at a low price.

Paired with Microsoft Office, SharePoint's document collaboration capabilities have proved so irresistible that Microsoft is touting SharePoint, not Exchange e-mail server, in order to lure IBM Lotus Notes users over to the Microsoft stack.

But despite Microsoft's claims to the contrary, migrations from Notes/Domino over to Outlook/Exchange/SharePoint have been slowing for the past five years, according to analyst David Ferris of Ferris Research.

"Everyone still says that their strategic direction is to migrate to Microsoft. But as a practical matter, those who could easily do it would have already done it," Ferris said. For users still on Notes, porting to Microsoft today "would be too expensive and too disruptive," he added.

The economic downturn and the resulting belt-tightening doesn't help, either.

Enter Silicon Valley software vendor Mainsoft Corp. The Milpitas, Calif., company was formerly a maker of development tools that allowed programmers experienced in IBM's Java EE environment to easily port their apps to Microsoft's .Net Framework.

But spotting an opportunity, Mainsoft released in May its SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes.

"There are lots of people offering to help you migrate. Nobody before us seriously considered a coexistence strategy," said Yaacov Cohen, CEO of Mainsoft.

The software lets users of Lotus Notes Versions 6.5 through 8 drag and drop Office documents to SharePoint and back. It's simple, but users such as Nader Chahine, a manager at Manhattan Home Finance in Manhattan Beach, Calif., praise SharePoint Integrator.

"Without the Integrator, we may have bailed on SharePoint altogether," he said. "My team was rebelling against using SharePoint because attaching and detaching documents from SharePoint to Notes was such a nightmare."

Manhattan pays $125 per user license for Integrator, plus 20% of the total annually for maintenance, said Chahine, who calls it "really reasonable."

Version 1.5 of Integrator is expected to be available next week. It will add the ability for users to publish their Notes e-mail and metadata to a SharePoint site, too.

Mainsoft also announced today the beta release of software that will enable SharePoint to be integrated with IBM's Rational Jazz programming environment. When released in the first quarter of 2009, the tool will enable Eclipse developers to have full access to SharePoint sites and documents, or to e-mails and tasks from Microsoft Outlook.

Cohen admitted that Integrator is still "missing support for Notes calendars and offline folders." But he claimed that Integrator already "provides superior integration from Notes to SharePoint than Outlook does out of the box."

Ferris is more cautious.

"Whenever you have got different environments, you tend to have some compromise," he said. Still, "it would seem to me that a coexistence strategy will be attractive to many people," he added, since "Notes migration projects are so expensive and risky. They are this generation's ERP project."

Mainsoft has tight partnerships with both IBM and Microsoft. Cohen said walking this tightrope is less fraught with danger than one might think.

"You can look at it both ways. We are helping Microsoft accelerate adoption of SharePoint. But we are also helping IBM to keep users on Notes," he said. "At the end of the day, we are very focused on the end user, who is suffering from the lack of interoperability."

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