How does IBM work with Microsoft Tools?

I attended a session on the various products IBM offers and how they interact with Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.  My reality is that no company is a completely homogeneous entity.   I typically see multiple vendors and a large overlap of solutions.  But when you talk collaboration, you want your email system to work with your other tool  Exchange should work with your collaboration and portal platforms.  To a large extent, IBM gets that and has invested in integration.  Here are a couple highlights from the presentation.

Infrastructure

Most IBM tools support the infrastructure side of things.  You can run on Windows Servers. You can store data in SQL Server and Active Directory. You can embed a person card in websites.

Applications

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The presenter spent most of his time focusing on how Outlook, Microsoft Office, and Sharepoint can work with IBM Products.

Outlook

• You can easily integrate the person card from Lotus Connections Profiles
• You can drag and drop your emails from Outlook to Connections Activities
• You can drag and drop your files to Quickr
• You can save Connections profiles of your colleagues to Outlook Contacts
• You can also insert email address from Connections into email address lines in Outlook
• Outlook feed reader can consume feeds from Quickr, Connections, Portal, etc.
• You can embed Sametime online awareness into emails, etc.
• Outlook also lets Sametime Unified Telephony so you can make calls and update status straight from Outlook
• Sametime meetings can be started and scheduled from Outlook
• Much of this is integrated into the menu or via the task pane

Microsoft Office

IBM’s message state that they will work with multiple versions of office includeing 2003, 2007, and 2010.

• You can embed the profile or person cards
• You can search Connection Profiles
• From the the Quickr or Connections button, you can save your file directly to Quickr or Connections. You can also check out files from these tools.
• You can also save your document to a blog post
• Office integrates to Connections Activities so you can save tasks and docs to a specific activity

Sharepoint

I’m seeing a lot of interest in how WebSphere Portal and Lotus Connections play nicely with Sharepoint and MOSS.  While IBM is still working through the integration, they are making progress.  It started out as very basic but is maturing more with each year.

• The person card is available from within Sharepoint
• You can actually add users from Connections to a Sharepoint site.  Find them in Connections and add them to Sharepoint
• Lotus Bookmarks are available in Sharepoint
• You can do a Profile search
• You can consume content from Quickr, Portal, and Connections using the out of the box feed web part
• Share documents between  Sharepoint sites and Lotus Connections Communities. (OK, I really liked this one.
• You can embed the tag cloud from Connections in Sharepoint
• Mainsoft, an IBM partner, offers their Harmony product which integrates Notes Calendar and Sharpoint Calendar

Portal Integration with Microsoft

• Mainsoft has some great out of the box portlets to pull in all kinds of Sharepoint content.
• The Web Application Connector or Bridge, which is available on the business solutions catalog will let you pull Sharepoint straight into portal.
• The presenter showed a variety of portlets he built to show excel data in a more friendly to consume web 2.0 or AJAX interface