Mainsoft bridges Lotus Notes and SharePoint

SharePoint Integrator bridges the gap between Notes-based email systems and SharePoint repositories

Mainsoft has announced the UK release of its software that lets Lotus Notes users access corporate content in Microsoft SharePoint servers.

Available immediately, SharePoint Integrator 1.5 for Lotus Notes is designed to bridge the gap between Notes-based email systems and SharePoint repositories for sharing documents and other content.

At least 40,000 enterprises still use Lotus Notes for email, according to Mainsoft. The vast majority of these also use Microsoft Office, and many have embraced SharePoint to help with collaboration.

"You need to find a way to integrate the two, but little effort has been made by IBM or Microsoft," said Mainsoft chief executive Yaacov Cohen.

With SharePoint Integrator, Notes users can simply drag and drop Notes emails and attachments into SharePoint, making it easier to share the information than emailing it round to colleagues.

Conversely, SharePoint documents can just as easily be moved into Notes databases such as email, calendars, task lists and team rooms.

SharePoint Integrator is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in for Lotus Notes 8 and as a rich standalone client that docks to Notes versions 7.x and 6.5.x. It uses SharePoint Soap web services to access SharePoint content directly from either Windows SharePoint Server 3 or SharePoint Server 2007.

The application is a client-side install, as many SharePoint servers are hosted outside the organisation using them, Cohen said.

The alternative to a tool such as SharePoint Integrator is to migrate from Notes to Outlook and Exchange, but such a project might easily cost upwards of $6m (£4m) to fully migrate 30,000 users.

"We cost about 10 per cent of that figure or less, including implementation costs," said Cohen.

SharePoint Integrator will be available in the UK through Polymorph, an IT consultant that is an IBM Premier Business Partner and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

Andy Dunbar, solutions sales manager at Polymorph, said that the product should typically cost about €68 (£59) per user, but this could fall to under €10 (£8.75) for large deployments.