Outlook and Lotus Notes

About a year ago, my company (a large holding company) decided to standardize all of their sub-companies on a single e-mail platform.  Since we are a holding company, each sub-company essentially used their own messaging software.  In the US, that meant that we were converting from Novell Groupwise (a very thin e-mail software) to another platform.  After a lengthy RFP process, that platform became IBM's Lotus Notes.  Keep in mind, I like certain aspects of the collaboration platform.  The Lotus Sametime application is really quite nice as a web conferencing platform and the application/workflow software for developers is pretty slick too.  That said, though, my main complaint is that the desktop Client incorporates the UI for all of these features.  This makes the actual Lotus Notes client quite a behemoth in terms of a HDD footprint and a bit of a hog of system resources.  So much so, that I oftentimes use the Web Client to monitor e-mail/schedule meetings/etc. throughout the day. 

It always surprised me that IBM never released a Notes Thin Client - which only did things like e-mail and calendar.  In any case, a friend of mine was trying to configure MS Outlook to work through Lotus Notes last Thursday and could not figure it out.  Well, I figured that Pop3 probably wouldn't be the way to go as you get no actual synchronization between Notes and Outlook that way.  After digging around a bit today, though, I found the wonderful Outlook 2003/2002 Add-in:  Notes Connector.  From the download page:

"Outlook Connector for IBM Lotus Domino enables you to use Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2002 to access your e-mail messages, calendar, address book, and To Do (task) items on an IBM Lotus Domino Release 5.x or Release 6.x server."

Under the covers, this add-in provides a full MAPI driver for Lotus Notes that uses your Notes ID file to communicate with the Domino servers.  It's actually a fairly brilliant solution to the problems mentioned above. 

In any case, I was up and running with Notes and Outlook in just a few minutes after finding this excellent article giving step-by-step instructions on how to install the addin and set it up.  I highly recommend reading it and following the steps (especially the one "Uninstall Microsoft Hotfixes").  I'm sure there are some snafu's with the add-in, but after about 5 hours of using it (so far), I haven't run into any.  If I do, though, I'll make sure to post the problem and solution.

Enjoy!