development on SharePoint v.s. development on Lotus Connections

Question

Hello everyone,

I am selecting between SharePoint and Lotus Connections, and I want gurus give me some advice. The functions I want to have is, portal/content management/workflow/various ways of communication (IM/audio/video/multi-party conference), better to have personal blog or team blog.

Another key issue I want to consider is the flexibility/ease to extend the platform (either SharePoint or Connections) to implement/customize the functions I mentioned above.

Any advice or referred documents are welcome.

EDIT1: Does anyone have any good published documents to refer?

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

As a SharePoint consultant I'm probably a little biased, but I'd go with SharePoint - it's got a good range of out of box capabilities and development practices are getting reasonably mature.

I would also note that I've seen a lot of organizations moving from Notes to SharePoint - it's not relevant in technical terms, but may be important in the future.

Ultimately the choice of platform doesn't matter so much as what you do with it, particularly in terms of infrastructure and development practices. I've seen some really badly organized SharePoint systems, but the issues are always something that could have been avoided if it was all thought through properly at the start.

Answer 2

Another SharePoint Admin here (means NO experience w/ Lotus products) but as the admin of another platform before SharePoint, I can give you some thoughts on why we switched, and what we've seen as some advantages of the SP platform. May or may not apply to your situation.

1. Integration w/ other MS products. I work in a MS centric environment, and we had just upgraded to Exchange 2007 as well as Office 2007. The degree of integration between those 3 platforms has been very helpful in driving user adoption. Specifically the ability to create and check in documents from Word - straight to an SP doc library etc. If you are using an older version of Office, the integration still exists, but it's not quite as clean. MS has a paper on their site which outlines the differences in functionality w/ SP 2007 and the different versions of Office.

2. In your post you mentioned IM / Video etc - just to clarify - SharePoint does not provide this functionality - but it does integrate well w/ the MS product that does - Office Communication Server. This is a very powerful tool which provides chat, shared desktop, IP based video and audio conferencing - and for SP - presence awareness. What this means is, if you drill into a document library - and see a white paper that I wrote, or just updated - by my name will be a small dot, which will show green (available) yellow (idle) red (busy) as well as give you options to email me, text, set an appt etc. The amount of collaboration this has facilitated has really helped our teams. I have a question about your white paper, proposal etc, I see you are online, and I can ping you immediately. Very cool.

3. Connectivity to other platforms. Our previous document management system was very niche - and the idea of connecting a multi-function printer / scanner to is and scan documents directly into the system was non-existant. With SP, however, its such a standard, that you can connect to pretty much any system out there.

4. Extendability. On our old platform, we had to train developers specifically on that system. In most cases we ended up hiring outside consultants to develop and maintain the platform which was not cheap. With SP, 85% of what we want to do is available out of the box, or with no coding available. For the small percentage of true customization that is requested, our .Net developers can handle it (since the code base is the same) This means we can manage resources much more effectively and do all out development in house.

Those are a few things that come to mind. In terms of the documentation you ask for - MS does have some pretty good whitepapers on their site which document company's experiences with migration from other systems, cost savings etc. Some propaganda there - but also some good information. My understanding is that SharePoint is MS's fastest growing application - and they have put a lot of money into making it a robust platform. Its on version 3 now - with 4 due out before the end of the year - so it's turning into a very mature platform as well.

That at least gives you one side of the coin. Hope you can get some insight on Lotus.

Answer 3

I haven't compiled a list of documents to support my response - just relating to you more my experience having switched from a niche product to one more main stream. So my response was more personal opinion and experience - not fact or documented research. Hopefully I raised some issues you hadn't thought about before.

In dealing w/ the Word questions. It is possible to create a document library that uses a Word document template as it's foundation for new documents.

So - let's say my company has defined a proposal template in Word. This template has a preset definition for the font to be used, has my company logo on the front page, has the standard legal disclaimer page saying the proposal is only valid for 48 hours from receipt, a standard table or grid where product number, description, quantity and price are layed out etc.

Now, my company requires that all proposals be based on this template. And that all proposals be stored in a Pursuits library on SharePoint.

So I could do one of 2 things. I could distribute this template to all sales staff and their assistants. Have them install it locally on their machine, and when it's time for them to write a proposal, the create a new document in Word, based off that proposal and trust that they will upload it to the Pursuits library. When I have changes to the template, I would make them, and have to send out a new, updated template to everyone who uses it, hoping that they are able to install it correctly etc.

OR...

I could create the Pursuits library - and upload the Proposal template to that library as the template new documents are based off of. Doing that, when a new proposal needs to be written, you would navigate to the library, click [New] in the library toolbar, and a new document would be created based off that template. The proposal is completed, and as part of the save process, the proposal is uploaded automagically into the Pursuits libary.

If I have a change or update to the template, I would make it, and then upload the new teamplate version to SharePoint - secure in the knowledge that everyone creating new proposals in that library would be using the new template.

This same scenario would apply to a standard template for other office products as well. In fact, we have a standard Powerpoint template, w/ copyrights, standard fonts, company brand and colors predefined - using the same scenario. If someone wants to make a new powerpoint presentation - starting w/ the template loaded in a document library ensures that they maintain our brand requirements.

Another example of the kind of integration SP has w/ Office applications - when you create an email, and then go to attach a document to it - Outlook will give you the option of sending the attachment, or just placing a link to the file in the email - so recipients can just go to the appropriate site on SharePoint where the file exists.

Email load for us has dropped significantly, and - because of the way the link works - you are always assured of getting the most current version of the document when you click on it. No more sorting through your emails - trying to impose version control via the sent date on an email message.

Now this only works if all recipients are internal associates. If you are emailing to a client, chance are they won't have the permissions to access your intranet via the included link.

Hope that helps.

Answer 4

Based on your function list, the Lotus product you want is not Connections but Quickr. I'm biased, too, and have no direct experience of either Sharepoint or Connections, but you should check out: http://migratenotes.wordpress.com/