Those are the Sharepoint 2007 APIs. Those must be new since I searched for it about 8 months ago and couldn't find anything. A customer in the banking industry wanted to know how the APIs compared as part of a collaboration bake-off. Here are my findings:
| Lotus Connections | Sharepoint |
| Uses a REST style API; i.e. it works anywhere, from anywhere!!! | Only works on .NET applications; i.e. VB.NET, ASP.NET, etc.. (5 web services are available, but that's only about 1% of all the APIs that Sharepoint provides) |
| APIs are accessible from any device connected to a network | Some APIs need to be run on the server!!!! |
| You can pretty much CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) everything | You can't add/retrieve documents, but you can edit them |
| Includes a person card that can be added to 3rd party applications | Can't do it |
| Results returned in clear XML -- easily reusable | Results are propietary (except if you use 1% of the APIs [web services]) |
| Can retrieve results in HTML for easy rendering on other applications (e.g. Dogear bookmarks) | Can't do it |
| URLs are clean and reusable (i.e. RESTful) | Can't do it |
| Provides 'subscribable' search results (i.e. you can subscribe to a particular search so that you are notified immediately when the search results changes!) | Can't do it |
Who's the winner ? I think it's pretty clear...