4. Offline Capabilities: Although many of us count on continuous internet connectivity and bandwidth, many legacy Notes applications depend on the ability to “go offline.”  Notes is famous for its ability to replicate to your laptop whatever data you need to continue working while unplugged.   

SharePoint appeared a decade later, designed for a modern connected world and optimized for server applications that delivered much lower cost of ownership and many other benefits.  However, there still are times when you need the ability to work on a plane, at a customer site where you can’t access the internet, or in your vacation home “off the grid.”

SharePoint Workspaces address this need. You can synchronize lists, libraries and entire sites to your laptop, use them offline, and then sync up with the site the next time you connect.  This functionality is largely based on the Groove technology built by many of the same developers who worked on the original Notes product.  Microsoft has done a great job at taking the best of the Groove plumbing and repackaging it as a very compelling offering to fulfill most of the “offline” needs of a typical Notes application.

5. SharePoint Online: Many organizations considering a move from Notes to Microsoft have investigated a hosted environment. The Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) is an obvious choice with its “Dedicated” version that allows large enterprises to have dedicated private hosted servers, and “Standard” version, in which multiple customers share one hosted environment.  

While Exchange Online has been popular for replacing Notes mail/calendar environments, movement to SharePoint Online has been much slower, mainly due to the limited capabilities for customizing applications and the platform’s inability to migrate legacy content to hosted servers.  The next generation of SharePoint Online, based on SharePoint 2010, is a different story.The SharePoint Online team previously had to limit customizations because there was no way to ensure they would not cause problems. To resolve this, SharePoint 2010 contains a sandbox, providing a safe way for the server to run code written and uploaded by other people. Another important feature of SharePoint Online is a set of web services that enable migration tools to do a good job moving Notes application design and content. It’s worth mentioning that some customers take a hybrid approach, migrating certain Notes applications to on-premises SharePoint environments, and others to SharePoint Online.