Microsoft CRM and IBM Lotus Notes Domino seem to be taking completely different paths and if company is Microsoft oriented - we see MS CRM, MS Exchange, MS SQL Server, SharePoint, etc. In the case of Lotus Domino - it is opposite - Lotus is corporate Information Media and could technically play CRM role with internal messaging coming through Lotus Domino server. However realities of modern corporation give us multiple examples when Microsoft CRM and Lotus Domino should coexist in compromise. There are several reasons why corporation doesn't like to stick to one platform:

1. Balancing several platforms not to be trapped to the one-vendor solution. Imagine, that you placed all the eggs into one basket and then this basket went into the trouble (lawsuit, bankruptcy, mismanagement, hostile takeover - to name a few in the life of the modern American corporation)

2. Legacy-dependence. If your corporation uses such product as Lotus Notes/Domino for 10 plus years - you can expect that majority of documents are stored in the Lotus databases. Just conversion of this legacy database is multi-million dollars project. And again - we could not predict the future accurately - who will win or lose - IBM or Microsoft - or maybe they will merge

3. Procedures and flowcharts. Nowadays corporation works and builds its business model around computer business system, consider things like users training, functional flowcharts/diagrams, reporting to investors, IDE with company vendors and customer. And we'd dare to say that these things are computer application platform dependent (even being designed in the heads of corporation founding leaders as abstract business processes - then they were placed into the computer platform and had to fit to its pluses and minuses)

Considering these arguments and having multiple requests from Microsoft Business Solutions and directly from our prospects and customer, we have realized the connector, which allows Microsoft CRM use Lotus Domino email server with similar messaging functionality as Microsoft Exchange 2003/2000 Microsoft CRM Exchange connector needs to be installed and its DLL based functionality is superceded by our own DLL, which communicates with Lotus Domino server via Java Agents

You can always have us help you with the integration and customization. Call us: 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918.

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies ? USA nationwide Microsoft CRM, Microsoft Great Plains customization company, serving clients in Chicago, California, Texas, New York, Georgia, Arizona, Louisiana, Michigan, Florida, Canada, UK, Australia, South Africa and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer.