Out of the Box SharePoint and Lotus Notes Integration

*Note: this need a bit of revising. In further tests I found that address data can screw things up for Notes

I should rephrase the title as NEARLY Out of the Box (OOTB). You will see in a bit. I won't claim to have all the answers here about how and why Notes and SharePoint do what they do, but I will document my findings.

First, I don't want to discuss why anyone would want to use either of these products or choose to use them together, nor will I discuss the relative merits of these products and alternatives to them.

Second, the three big areas where my firm needs integration are calendars, contacts and content. This entry concerns the first two of these. It is my belief that you can tackle these independently.

One could treat this as a glass half empty or half full kind of thing - Notes and SharePoint have a surprising amount in common. After all, Lotus and Microsoft engineers were the co-originators of the iCal format, so it shouldn't be surprising that there is support for the standard. Some of this stuff works really well. But I am being overly positive.

It seemed like presenting this information in a matrix might work, and I may still go back and change things around that way. But for now, so as to organize my observations and thoughts, I will just list each of the observations I have made:

1. If you invite a mail enabled SharePoint calendar to a meeting from Notes, the calendar will nicely display the meeting, accept updates, etc. The Sharepoint document also has an ICS file as an attachment (handy, you'd think).
2. Sharepoint contacts lists cannot accept email.
3. OOTB SharePoint contacts and calendars lists have Export Event buttons in their items. Clicking these presents a file download dialog for and iCalendar (ICS) or vCard (VCF) file. There is also an Export Contact selection on the edit menu for contacts. These exports work - more on that later.
4. There is a nice, straightforward iCal Exporter piece out on Codeplex (http://www.codeplex.com/CKS/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4234). It's one little WSP file and you add the solution and then activate it. From then on all calendars in the site collection will have an Action menu item to export the entire calendar to an ICS file.
5. If you drag and drop an ICS file on a Notes calendar, it will open a dialog with options for "importing" one or more calendar entries.
6. ICS (iCal) files attached to emails can be "viewed" or "opened" in Notes and will act the same as they do with drag and drop.
7. When you choose to import an iCal, Notes creates an entry in the inbox which you then open and add to your calendar.
8. (As far as I can tell) you cannot open a iCal file in Notes by starting with a command line or by simply opening it from the SharePoint site's export download dialog. This really bugs me.
9. You cannot get a hold of that nice ICS file I described in #1 and do anything cool with it from a simple workflow (like mail it to people).
10. As long as you have .VCF associated with Notes, you open a vCard directly into Notes (from either the edit menu or the button inside the contact). You can open vCards just about any way you want in Notes - drag and drop works too.
11. Sharepoint does not accept vCards. I don't understand this. It seems like a glaring omission.

My conclusion is that we are part way there without doing much. Opening iCals in Notes is funky in that it doesn't work from the file system or from the web and files presented inside the Notes client require specific user interaction and result in new calendar items in the inbox. But it works. Inviting a calendar from Notes works very nicely (getting updates and stuff). Contacts work fairly well, but only one at a time. From here comes the hard part - closing the loop and making all this usable.

Tests were done with Notes 6.5.3 clients and MOSS 2007.
A couple references:

This entry explains a lot, but not why you can't just open the file with Notes.
http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/using-calendar-standards---ics-and-vcs-files?opendocument&comments

And this is a script for Notes to export.
http://www.lndcentral.com/article.php?story=20060503111031179. This would be easy to try but hard for us to implement (we are always very deliberate with mail template changes). It seemed interesting.