Earlier this week, the Lotus development team released the beta version of the new Lotus Connections plugin for Microsoft Sharepoint. You may remember that I mentioned this was coming when I did my recap of Lotusphere ealier this year. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you are probably familiar with the integration capabilities of Lotus Connections into Microsoft Sharepoint.
As soon as the plugin was available, and I got some free time, I installed it into a test system to give it a test drive. The installation was pretty straightforward. Basically, you run a wizard that asks you for two parameters: 1) the URL for the Connections Profiles service, and 2) the URL for your Sharepoint site (which was automatically detected for me). Clicking Next a couple more times and 2-3 minutes later the plugin was installed!
The new plugin provides 3 capabilities out of the box:
- Adds the Lotus Connections person card EVERYWHERE a name appears
- Adds a tag cloud web part to surface the global Lotus Connections tag cloud in Sharepoint
- Adds Profiles search mechanism as an additional search engine in Sharepoint
To see these capabilities in action, check out this quick demo that I just recorded.
I'm sure this is going to make a lot of people happy. Connections and Sharepoint integration is a topic that comes up a lot with my customers. I'm also hoping that Mike Gotta, Industry Analyst with the Burton Group, will be happy as well since he was expecting more integration between Connections and Sharepoint earlier this year.