Contacts – DAMO / Outlook / MobileMe

Contacts – DAMO / Outlook / MobileMe

If you’ve read the posting about this combination for Calendar, the steps for procuring and setting up DAMO, Outlook and MobileMe are exactly the same.  Once you get that done (or while you’re doing it), you’ll need an iNotes / DWA style mail file with the contacts stored in the file.  When DAMO syncs your mail file with your Outlook PST file, the contacts it uses are the ones in your mail file, not the ones in your local address book.  To sync your mail file contacts with your local address book:

• Open your mail file in Notes
• Select Actions > Synchronize Address Book

Why you cannot edit your contacts in your mail file from the Notes client is beyond me, but that’s a gripe for another day.

As far as how this works, honestly it works pretty well.  Any complaints about the convoluted nature of this set up are just the same as calendar.  As long as all the moving parts are working together in harmony, you’re all set.  Again, I can’t recommend this for your CEO, but if you can get all of this up and working, you’re l33t enough to make it happen.

FAQ – Lotus iNotes Support for Apple iPhone

Thanks to Kevin Hansen for bringing this to our attention and to Paul Mooney for posting it.

http://www.pmooney.net/dload/iphoneinotes.pdf

Check out what Ed Brill had to say in comment #7 on this post on his blog.  So now I’m confused.  I would not be surprised if the SDK did not allow IBM to write a Traveler client for iPhone.  I’m not sure that’s really what people want, anyway.  But from what Ed says, it would seem that Apple could license the Traveler server protocols to connect their own iPhone applications to a Domino server.

Am I off base here?  If so, let me know.

Calendar – DAMO / Outlook / MobileMe

I can’t claim credit for this.  I have to thank Sander Zwart for his post on the Domino 8 forum at ibm.com.

While it may seem convoluted, it does work.  And it’s actually not all that bad.  First of all, you have to get your hands on Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO).  You’ll need to log into IBM’s Passport site to download it.  You do have a user profile for Passport, right?  I hope so, because you can’t have mine.  And I have absolutely no idea how to get one.  Honestly, I’m really not sure how I got mine.  But once you’re in, I’m sure you’ll find it no more difficult to navigate than the Himalayas.  Unfortunately, they don’t have any Sherpas to guide you along.  I’ll do my best.

• In the left nav bar, click on “Software download & media access”
• In the Overview section, click on “Download Finder”
• In the list of entitled downloads, I chose IBM Lotus Notes with Collaboration, then click Continue
• Pick your language and click Continue
• Expand the plus sign next to IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.2 for Multiplatforms English eAssembly(CR7LBEN)
• Uncheck everything other than IBM Lotus Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook 8.0.2 English(C1K37EN).  I’d tell you to use the handy “uncheck all” link — but there is not one.  Hope you have some time to kill
• Agree with the license agreement and click “Download Now”

Forget all of that.  Look in the HTML directory of your Domino install for a DAO directory.  That should be it.

There.  That was easy.  Before you install DAMO, do the following:

• Archive any mail you can.  You’ll be copying your mail to an Outlook PST file
• Run Outlook at least once

Next, install DAMO.  Then run Outlook and let it build your PST file.  I would not recommend doing this at home, connected via VPN to your server, using an old 802.11b wireless network.  Just guessing.  Several hours later, you will have a working install of Outlook (which brings its own interesting possibilities).

While you’re getting Outlook set up, go ahead and visit me.com to set up your MobileMe account.  They’re nice enough to give you a free 60 day trial.  I know there have been some issues with this in the past, but my credit card has not been charged.

Once Outlook is done building your PST file and you have your MobileMe account, you can install the MobileMe sync client.

After MobileMe sync is installed, run it to sync your Outlook data (which is actually your Domino data) to your MobileMe account.  If push sync is working, any data you sync to MobileMe will appear on your iPhone.  Until earlier this afternoon, I had not seen where push sync was having any problems.  It did earlier today, but it’s fixed now.

Once you get this going, it works fairly well.  When everything syncs with everything else, calendar entries created in Notes will appear on your iPhone.  And entries created on the iPhone calendar will appear in Notes.  Entries created in MobileMe will appear both places.  I have MobileMe set to sync automatically, which translates to every 15 minutes (hardly seems automatic to me).

Obviously, there are numerous issues with this:

• Outlook must be up and running in order to keep your PST up-to-date.  You don’t need to use it, I bounce back and forth between Outlook and Notes.  If you are on the road frequently, this may be a problem
• MobileMe costs money
• While generally solid, DAMO can be a bit flaky at times.  Yesterday, it decided to have a problem and rebuild my PST file.  But several hours later, it was working fine
• MobileMe costs money

Enterprise class?  I’m not sure yet.  I’d like a little more time with this to see.  But other than that PST rebuild, so far, so good.  Don’t be surprised if you tell someone to keep Outlook up and running that they start using it.  As you’ll see in another post, I also use MobileMe to keep contacts in sync.  If there were a way to change the reply-to address on the mail client when sending from the MobileMe account, I’d halfway consider forwarding my corporate mail to it.  I have not had the problems with it that others have reported earlier.  Then again, I’m still on my free trial.

Email – IMAP / VPN / AT&T SMTP

This is my initial foray into email and what I’ve been using for about a week.  I’m using IMAP to connect the native iPhone mail client to my mailbox. 

There are tons of articles that will show you how to do this, so I won’t go into the details on how to do this.  But if you’re looking for some, you can check out what Chris Linwood and Andy Brunner suggest.  I’ve connected enough mail clients to enough IMAP servers that I really didn’t need any examples to do it.  We’ve already been running IMAP on our main Domino server for some time (for among other reasons, we have intranet applications that monitor certain group mailboxes).  Note that we are not running IMAP over SSL because right now we are not allowing IMAP through the firewall.  For that reason, I’m using the iPhone’s VPN client to access our IMAP server.

As for SMTP, I’m using the AT&T SMTP server that my phone came configured with.  Now, so far I haven’t had any problems using AT&Ts server.  I’ll be sure to update this post if anyone’s spam filter balks at my mail. 

Now, do I think this is enterprise class?  No, not really.  It’s fine for me; I don’t have much of a problem VPNing into our network to get mail.  But I realize that I probably can’t put this thing in the hands of a VP of Sales and expect him to dig down into Settings to connect to our VPN.  He’s going to hit the Mail icon on the home screen, then wonder where his new mail is.  It wouldn’t be bad if we could get the Mail client to automatically connect to our VPN.  It might even be OK if there were a VPN connection icon on the home screen (many of our clients’ execs regularly connect to our VPN on their laptops).  But digging down into Settings to get to it?  No bueno.  Also, when I move messages out of my Inbox and into folders on the iPhone, the messages stay in my Inbox in Lotus Notes.  Plus, I don’t have access to our corporate address book.  Right now, I’d say this is for l33t HAxoRs only.

Hello world!

Welcome to domino / iphone / blog.  Why are we doing this? Well, our boss gave iPhones to some of us in R&D to play with.  Happy day, right?  And then he told us to figure out how to make them work with Domino.  We’re all waiting for an executive to walk downstairs with one.  There’s lots of great info out there on this subject (along with lots of hand-wringing about the type of support offered for Exchange).  No matter; it’s up to us to make this thing work.  That’s what we do.  We’re not Domino fanboys (I was the admin in a past life, but that was back in the R6 days), but I know that we’re not about to move to Exchange any time soon.

So anyway, we figured we need someplace to share our findings with each other.  That’s when I was reminded of what George Bernard Shaw said:

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

So we asked our bosses and got permission to start a public blog on the subject.  Hopefully this will help you, and I’m sure we’ll learn quite a bit in the process.

Thanks,

Mike E.