My thoughts on today’s session at Enterprise 2.0

Suzanne O Minassian  June 9 2008 05:53:47 PM

Thanks to all who attended today's 3 hour deep dive on Lotus Connections versus Microsoft Sharepoint. It's not often we have the opportunity to demonstrate Connections in such a head-on manner, and I thank Mike Gotta from the Burton Group, Lawrence Liu and Venky Veeraraghavan from Microsoft, and of course, my co-presenter, Heidi Votaw for coordinating and putting together today's session.

I have to admit, when I was first asked about doing such a session, I didn't think Sharepoint versus Connections was an even comparison. As Lawrence and Venky mentioned in their portion of the session, Sharepoint is a platform, and one I would compare more to our IBM Websphere Portal platform. Lotus Connections is a set of applications that can be delivered into a platform like a portal or even Sharepoint, but Lotus Connections does not require a portal or middle layer to run - they can run simply on their own.  If you want the power of a platform for building applications, using a workflow engine, delivering personalized content, handling multiple layers of security, building dashboards, and more, Websphere Portal provides this kind of capability. Lotus Connections, on the other hand, is sharply focused on social services, and we can deliver those services in the context of portals, existing sites, or standalone. We have customers who deploy Connections in both manners - through an existing site or on its own.

What I showed in the first 15 minutes were examples of Connections being delivered through a portal environment. Because these were portal examples, I touched on some aspects that are part of a portal platform - forms, personalized content, custom applications - and talked about how we can deliver our social data into this environment. During the deep dive, however, I showed Lotus Connections with no customization being delivered as standalone applications. If you want to view some of these components again, I recently posted a series of demo movies on YouTube and Viddler which will take you through a shorter version of the components.

I wanted to take a moment and clarify this, as the backchannel asked lots of questions in this regard.

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