Providing turnkey solutions for migrating Lotus Notes applications to SharePoint

Why migrate to SharePoint?

• Integrated document, content and knowledge management
• Tight integration with MS Office
• Easy to extend and build business applications on top
• Supports Web 2.0 and Social applications
• Robust collaboration framework
• Powerful Enterprise search – for data, people and expertise
• Easy integration with back end systems through business data catalog
• Easy to implement forms and workflow automation with Windows Workflow Foundation

Common pitfalls in a Lotus Notes to SharePoint migration?

• Not choosing the right tools – leading to data loss
• Lack of a well thought through SharePoint strategy before the migration
• Radically different design implementation in the SharePoint environment – making the transition for end users difficult
• Lack of well structured post migration training and support

What do we do?

We leverage our extensive experience in SharePoint implementations and Lotus Notes to SharePoint migrations with a wide range of customers, to provide reliable, time and cost optimal turnkey migration services. Using the robust Proposion tool, we migrate customer’s Lotus Notes data into SharePoint lists such as to ensure minimal business disruption and zero data loss. We begin with a detailed analysis of the Lotus Notes environment followed by individual Lotus Notes application identification and categorization, which we then map over to corresponding SharePoint sites, lists, web parts etc. We ensure the overall design framework and look and feel doesn’t change so radically as to make a smooth transition difficult for users.

Applying our collaborative engagement model, we engage with the key stakeholders in the customer organization early on, and have weekly progress meetings with them to update them on the status as well as to train them on the go, as the migration is done.

Having an offshore development centre allows us to keep costs in check, and offer our customers attractive fixed price migration solutions.

Features

Experience in developing the next generation of intranets with SharePoint to our customers which is more user focused – both with MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0

About Sharepoint

Microsoft SharePoint is an extensible platform for integration, collaboration and communication that can meet the needs of small teams and large enterprises alike. It directly competes with the likes of Lotus Notes as a collaboration platform to allow end users to quickly create workspaces and has the intuitive business user UIs that are the trademark of all Microsoft technologies. With its support for metadata taxonomies, and Web 2.0 and Social tools, powerful self service and 2.0 type of user driven applications can be easily developed. Integrating with ilog rules engine allows for building flexible applications that business users can modify the behavior of as the business environment evolves, without any IT involvement.

Additionally, SharePoint provides an enterprise business framework that allows for a single sign-on, integration of enterprise application information from various systems. With MOSS 2007 and its capabilities in workflow, forms automation, business intelligence and document management, SharePoint is fast becoming the platform of choice to fill the white space between Enterprise ERP systems within organizations and end business user needs. It provides a centralized access point to key business data and information to business users and key stakeholders in a secure fashion, thereby becoming the enterprise ‘Single source of truth’.

SharePoint allows organizations to create applications for focused audiences that are either not available within existing ERP systems or are too clumsy to organize. These applications can be put together in portable, manageable components called “web parts” that can either be purchased or custom built. Being 80 per cent business ready out of box, SharePoint is one platform where convergence of self service and flexible custom applications can take place and centralized management of these made a reality, the quickest.

SharePoint in the Enterprise

SharePoint from a Business Perspective

•  A key strength of SharePoint lies in the fact that it efficiently ties workgroups and office users into business user communities. It allows business users to work collaboratively to aggregate, organize and share relevant business information, to achieve organizational goals together.

•  SharePoint allows for end users and department personnel to manage their data and information in a self service fashion.

•  SharePoint seamlessly integrates with the most popular productivity software - MS Office, allowing for rapid adoption and realization of overall productivity gains.

•  SharePoint is a flexible, web based platform. It allows for remote and mobile access with single sign on.

•  SharePoint can be easily extended to build self service flexible business applications on top that are secure, and allow for active collaboration with the external stakeholders.

SharePoint from an IT Perspective

•  SharePoint reduces total cost of ownership by delivering a single managed platform for all custom business process related applications that cannot be managed within an ERP system.

•  SharePoint increases the productivity of IT professionals by providing familiar, easy-to-use interfaces for management of data, users, and security.

•  SharePoint empowers business users to easily manage simple administrative tasks in their workspaces in a self service fashion. Many of the routine administrative tasks that used to tie up highly skilled IT professionals are now able to be quickly performed by the average business users themselves. This significantly improves mean time to resolution for support organizations, increases overall satisfaction of the user base and allows IT organizations to engage key IT resources towards more strategic goals.

•  SharePoint’s extensible framework reduces the overall cost of development, eases maintenance of custom applications and allows IT organizations the ability to rapidly deliver in-demand services. As a result, IT organizations realize shortened turnaround times to realize new business applications and can deliver more and better services with the same workforce.

Why OptimusBT?

Why Optimus BT Optimus BT has worked with customers from diverse business segments, starting from those in the Fortune 500 to the small and medium business. Our key expertise lies in developing integrated self service business solutions and products that help our customers meet their collaboration, workflow automation and BI needs. We leverage SharePoint's extensibility to develop these solutions and actively use its Web 2.0 and social tools to build Enterprise 2.0 solutions. By integrating ilog rules engines, we are able to make our solutions flexible, that the business users can modify the behavior of, per changing business needs.

Our solutions improve the visibility of the enterprise information to the business users through integration of databases and processes, and implementation of centralized dashboards. We help customers and partners implement and integrate SharePoint within the enterprise by providing unique SharePoint and Office based products, solutions and custom development services. We deliver value to customers worldwide through a complete set of end-to-end solutions based on SharePoint platforms, delivered on time and within budget by leveraging our distributed teams model and offshore development capability. Our products for SharePoint like Shopping cart, Credit card processing, Integrators for salesforce.com, Lotus Notes and MS CRM along with Active directory management bridge the critical gaps in Enterprise systems and add functionality to the SharePoint environment. Better value realization from their SharePoint investment is a natural payoff. In addition to our headquarters in Atlanta, we have a offshore development center in Bangalore, India from where we deliver cutting edge R&D with access to leading IT talent in the business. Our domain expertise extends across document management, migrations, Business Intelligence, Intranets/Extranets and Reporting Applications. We also have strong capabilities in XML, Web Services and Integration technologies to help our customers in integrating the Microsoft Office and SharePoint platforms with Line of Business and ERP systems.


Our unique engagement model
Our collaborative engagement model ensures we work with customers as partners, right through the project tenures, and afterwards. We engage early on with the key stakeholders, and have weekly progress review and update meetings, in which the progress details are shared and the necessary user training provided in sync, to ensure our customers are in step with the implementation details. Post implementation, there are comprehensive user training sessions, that ensure the end users are familiarized with the solution in detail, and can make the most of it.