Lately, there's been a lot of buzz around Lotus Connections and Google integration. More specifically, around Dogear and Google and the integration that I did a while ago. Earlier this week, I announced that this integration won 2nd place in the Lotus HackDay contest under the 'Web Applications' category. Yesterday, it was announced that this integration won 1st place in the HackDay Global Connections category! If you want to see what all the hype is about and start using this integration, follow these instructions.
Now, stuff just keeps getting better. With great timing, a business partner, Persistent Systems, has just released Google OneBox, a connector that can be deployed to your Google Search Appliance to automatically index Lotus Connections data and show it embedded in the Google search results. No browser plug-in required!
These slides explain a bit more about the solution:
I believe integration with enterprise search is extremely important for successful social software adoption. At IBM, we have driven adoption of social software partly by integrating enterprise search results with Lotus Connections search results. In fact, there's a trend now were most IBMers end up clicking on the Lotus Connections search results that are embedded and shown side-by-side the enterprise search results. In fact, IBM did a case study and was able to calculate a yearly multi-million dollar savings thanks to social bookmarking and enterprise search integration.
If you want to learn more about this solution, see the Google OneBox for Lotus Connections page. (it's not yet part of the Lotus Connections Solutions Catalog, but it will be soon).