developerWorks Lotus: Integrating IBM Lotus Domino data with Microsoft SharePoint Services

January 12 2007

Tony Patton takes a look at various integration methods between Lotus Domino and MS SharePoint...

Recently, we received a call from a client about migrating existing Domino data to a new SharePoint installation. It was a questionable proposal, given the client's large Domino installation. We asked questions and proceeded to reveal the various ways to leverage current Domino-based applications within the new SharePoint installation.

Integration is a fact of life in today's enterprise environments, which feature multiple application platforms, so the ease with which Lotus Domino and SharePoint can work together should be no surprise. There are numerous ways to integrate the platforms.
Very thorough discussion of the possibilities without political agenda.  Quite useful.

Link: developerWorks Lotus: Integrating IBM Lotus Domino data with Microsoft SharePoint Services >

Ed Brill Chicago, IL USA Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [8]

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  1. 1  Olaf Boerner http://www.bcc.biz | 1/12/2007 8:23:54 AM

    Praising the integration capabilities of Lotus Domino with Sharepoint is not the best kind of product marketing but its ok.

    The tough questions IBM/Lotus should ask themselves:

    Why does a Lotus Notes shop need Sharepoint in his environment ? What's the business case ?

    5 years ago the decision would have been: Create a Lotus Notes App for the business case.

    I think something is going wrong.

  1. 2  Axel Janssen  | 1/12/2007 8:58:51 AM

    We are currently evaluating sharepoint as one customer wants to run their business expert crafted excel sheet in a distributed fashion. Excel really isn't well equiped for such endeavour.

    There are really hundreds of tools out there mostly from small consultants which promise you that, but most of them are very unstable. Microsoft promises that Sharepoint serves you exactly that.

    Thanks god, good part of the xml capabilities of Domino are quite usefull, though please put a little bit more effort in the area of WS-I conform / document type webservices.

    I guess there will be some environments which prefer .NET to J2EE and for them its good to know how to integrate.

  1. 3  Axel Janssen  | 1/12/2007 9:20:43 AM

    ... and there have allways been redbooks, tipps to show us Domino experts how to integrate MS-Word & friends in our Domino Apps.

    Heck.

    Wasn't chapter 1 of the training material for Advanced Script Development in Notes 4.5 or 4.6 about how to integrate Domino with a MS-Access datababase?

    So nothing new for Lotus to provide info how to integrate Sharepoint with Domino :-)

  1. 4  Jeff Picco  | 1/12/2007 11:04:01 AM

    The company I'm working for just made the decision to dump QuickPlace and start using SharePoint. We have close to 160,000 seats, so I can only imagine how large this system will become.... Oh yea, Dom.doc is also going away in favor of using some of the SharePoint services. Not sure exactly how that maps yet though.

    Considering WP Messaging was on our road map for evaluation in 2009, I wonder what will happen with messaging since IBM dropped that.

  1. 5  Stephen Walch http://www.proposion.com | 1/12/2007 12:22:13 PM

    Every since we launched Proposion N2N (an ADO.NET data driver for Notes) we have been fighting the integration vs. migration battle. . In the early days, IBM’ers would dis us because talked about .NET and Microsoft reps would not consider anything short of “rip and replace”. But people on both sides of the fence seem to be warming up to what the CUSTOMERS want. The industry is way to complex for most organizations to insist on a single-vendor technology stack.

    For the last couple years now we have been focusing on Notes to SharePoint integration. This area is far richer than even we imagined at first. In addition to the “screen scraping” trick with the data view web part (see Tony Patton’s article) there are a number of ways where you can integrate via Domino 7 web services. And many customers use the Lotus Notes crawler that is part of the SharePoint search engine.

    With all that, we have still found huge opportunities for developing add-on products. At Lotusphere 2007 (pedestal #727) we will be showing no less than six Notes-SharePoint integration products ({ Link }

    - a set of SharePoint Web Parts that directly access Notes mail, calendar, contacts and tasks

    - a solution for using Domino Directory users and groups in SharePoint

    - a Domino-SharePoint single sign-on solution

    - a tool for Notes Client users archive content directly to SharePoint for compliance purposes

    - an extension to Reporting Services for adding reports of Notes data to your SharePoint site.

    - an ADO.NET data driver that allows developers to build custom SharePoint extensions

  1. 6  Paul Gagnon  | 1/12/2007 12:25:08 PM

    Tony did a nice job on this. His book 'Practical Lotusscript' is always nearby. The cheesy looking Domino app used in the example doesn't do Domino any justice though.

    Sharepoint certainly has the eye-candy doesn't it?

  1. 7  Simon http://thehojusaram.blogspot.com | 1/15/2007 6:28:30 PM

    I currently have the misfortune of migrating Domino Apps -> .Net / SQL /Exchange environment. I have a wrap up of some of the technical parts of the migration here:

    { Link }

  1. 8  david racicot  | 1/16/2007 6:33:02 PM

    Let's be clear. SharePoint is the enemy. A company that uses both is a) misinformed and wasting money on MS b) recently merged from two companies that used each product. The fact that an IT department with Notes would look at Sharepoint indicates that the IT department inclusing the CIO is not doing their job