Mainsoft News & Articles

It's hard not to listen to the team at Mainsoft (news, site), now rebranded as Harmon.ie, and not "get" the benefits of integrating collaborative capabilities into email. Of course, I live in my email, don't you?

Before I begin, I promise that you won’t have to trudge through a few paragraphs of marketing jargon to get to my point. I realize the title is very salesy. It’s that way on purpose because I believe there to be some credence to this mantra. The only downside to this challenge is that unlike Purina, you will not be receiving a free bag of dog food or a credit to your software assurance agreement if you’re unhappy. 

Enterprise news was all over the board this week, ranging from the once again delayed release of ChromeOS to social e-mail à la Facebook and Mainsoft. 

If you were one of the few involved in the beta for Mainsoft's (news, site) Enterprise version of Harmon.ie, then you already know how to make your email more social. For the rest of you, it's time to find out.

The focus of this year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston can be summed up in one word: Collaboration. The event was teeming with solutions of similar structure, each with an aim to enhance the same concept. And while that might've been a let down for attendees hoping to see some variation, it certainly serves as an undeniable indicator of the future of business. Here are some of the highlights:

Mainsoft (news, site) pumps up IBM's Rational Jazz with another addition to its line of social integration and collaboration tools.

 When Mainsoft (news, site) announced its new free Harmony solution that integrates SharePoint and Outlook, a lot of enterprises must have been interested, because now the company has launched an Enterprise Partner Program.

There are two things we like about Mainsoft's (news, site) latest solutions: 1) they enable us to connect our Outlook client with SharePoint or Google Apps and 2) they are free.

 

Yes, Mainsoft (news, site) is hanging out at Lotusphere this week. But the talk doesn't have to be all about IBM and Lotus does it? Well technically yes, it does. Mainsoft is just sprinkling in a bit of SharePoint 2010 to make it all that much more interesting.

We know there's a growing need within organizations to provide collaboration tools to project teams and areas like marketing and sales. But development teams also want and need collaboration capabilities, just not in a separate tool, but rather in the tools they already use daily.

And Mainsoft has striven to provide those collaboration capabilities to development teams using Rational Jazz. In the past, they have connected SharePoint and Lotus Quickr to Rational Jazz for document collaboration.

Now they add new social capabilities to the development platform from IBM Lotus Connections. Currently a technology preview and developed in collaboration with IBM Lotus and IBM Rational, users of Rational Jazz now have direct access to Lotus Connections capabilities like blogs, wikis, profiles, activities and more.

Team Concert and Lotus Connections Integration

The integration also enables Team Concert users to directly micro-blog, provide status updates and search profiles.

Says Michael Loria, vice president of business development, IBM Rational Software:

By working closely with Mainsoft, IBM Rational and IBM Lotus are making it easy for developers to exchange experiences, thoughts, and ideas with technical and business experts throughout the enterprise – boosting collaboration and agility in the software delivery process.

And there you have it. Developers go forth and collaborate.

Earlier this month we talked about how Mainsoft (news, site) was helping integrate SharePoint and IBM Rational Team Concert, providing SharePoint collaboration capabilities inside the Team Concert world. Good stuff for project teams.

But what about organizations who live inside their Lotus Notes environments? They also need some SharePoint love. And Mainsoft is providing it to them as well with the latest version of their Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes.

What's new in Version 2? Come have a look.

IBM and Microsoft will be forever entwined if Mainsoft (news, site) has anything to do with it. The provider of Java EE-Microsoft SharePoint integration software is constantly coming out with new ways to integrate SharePoint functionality with IBM solutions.

This time, they integrate SharePoint's social networking capabilities with IBM's Rational Team Concert.

In November we announced that Mainsoft (news, site) had released a beta of their latest solution, Document Collaboration for Rational Jazz, SharePoint Edition. It offered IBM Rational Jazz teams the ability to store their documents within SharePoint and access that SharePoint document library directly in Jazz.

They have now released the final version of that solution and it offers integration with not only SharePoint, but Lotus Quickr as well.

No one will argue that we need technologies and solutions that help us pull together and share content and information from the various content repositories we have in our organizations today. Gone are the days of single repositories for everything. That's why companies are diving deep into the content connector market to provide solutions to integrate content between repositories.

That's also why CMIS is such a desired specification for the enterprise content management market. But will this new spec, expected to be out late spring for a public review, be the demise of the content connector market?

At the Lotusphere conference this week you may have been among the lucky ones to see a demo of the latest Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes. This latest version includes integration to Lotus Notes 8.5.