Internet.com — Microsoft’s After The Lotus Notes Crowd

Clint Boulton — 22 January 2007
Microsoft is trying to crash IBM’s Lotusphere party.

The Redmond, Wash., company today introduced more free software tools to make it easier for customers of IBM’s Lotus collaboration software to move to and work with Microsoft’s competing SharePoint Services 3.0 suite.

Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Notes, role-based templates for SharePoint My Sites and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 application templates, come as IBM kicks off Lotusphere 2007 in Orlando, Fla.

As expected, Microsoft is trying to rain on Lotus’s annual parade (see Things to come from Lotus, five days ago). The rebuttals will appear in a couple of days, if previous patterns are followed.

“It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate… The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure… the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia… But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were — in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.”
1984, George Orwell