NotesPro (formerly NotesCal)

Several of us downloaded Jimmy Mooney’s NotesCal as soon as it came out, and I was one of the many seeing the November 28 – 1 bug.  We’ve all been waiting patiently for the bug fix to come out, and it has come out in spades.  Not only has Jimmy fixed the bug, he’s added mail, contacts and to-do lists to the application.

You still need to install an agent into your mail file, but it is absolutely no problem to do so.  Configuring the application was virtually no problem at all.  So how does it work?

Calendar – We’ll start with that, since that’s what NotesCal started with.  It’s a decent calendar app for showing you what you have coming up.  You cannot create calendar entries, nor can you accept calendar entries in your mailbox, but it’s a great view into your calendar entries.

Mail – Not bad, but not great.  The 20 message limit is a bit small, but it’s certainly workable.  If you don’t need access to everything in your mail file, it’s probably OK.  Formatting of the e-mail isn’t great (it looks like it doesn’t properly interpret line breaks yet), but it’s readable.

Contacts – We have far, far too many people in our public address book to support this functionality.

To-do – I rarely use the Notes to-do list, but it imported mine with no problem.

The app has gotten more expensive ($15 now, as opposed to $3 for NotesCal), but to Jimmy’s credit, he gave me my upgrade to NotesPro for free.  I truly appreciate that.

I e-mailed Jimmy shortly after downloading the upgrade, and he is promising better formatting for e-mail in an upcoming release.  He also told me that some kind soul e-mailed him an agent to access personal contact data that is stored in iNotes / DWA mail files.  To me, that is a huge plus (I don’t need to access all 2000 people in our public address book, I’ve copied most of the people I need into my personal contacts).

I also asked him about interacting with the native Contacts application, as the SDK allows access to this.  Jimmy replied that he likes keeping his business information separate from his personal information in the native application.  Fair enough.  I suppose we can agree to disagree on that one.

All-in-all, I rather like this, especially as an early release application.  For all you l33t h4×0rs out there, I still recommend IMAP/SMTP for mail and CompanionLink/NuevaSync for calendar and contacts.  If you’re on 8.0.2, you’ll want to take a long, hard look at iNotes Ultralite.  But if you’re on a server version earlier than 8.0.2 and an executive brings you an iPhone and says support it, this may be the app that saves your bacon.

I look forward to future upgrades.

Contacts – CompanionLink / GMail / NuevaSync

See below

Calendar – CompanionLink / GMail / NuevaSync

I haven’t been thrilled with DAMO / Outlook / MobileMe.  It was working for the most part, but I didn’t like having to run Outlook.  Also, DAMO seemed to crash every once in a while.  And If I didn’t have the right combination of programs running, I’d get weird error messages telling me that my MAPI provider wasn’t running.  Like I care.

One of the other guys I work with recently found NuevaSync.  Its ability to sync with Google calendar and contacts wirelessly and with push is pretty nice.  I don’t know what they’re doing, but it must be running Exchange ActiveSync somehow.  So how to get your Notes calendar and contacts over up to Google?  Enter CompanionLink for Google.  And it works like a charm.

At first, I was still a little annoyed with being required to use another go-between calendar service, but I realized there’s an upside to this.  I’ve been looking for a way for my wife to be able to view my work calendar.  Syncing it with Google is just the ticket.

Setting up CompanionLink is fairly easy.  This page tells you how to get it to run as a scheduled task in Windows.  A word to the wise — do not run a manual synchronization with the setup tool while Notes is running.

NuevaSync is a breeze.  Just sign up for an account, then follow the directions to set up your phone.

I’ve just started using this, but so far, I’m very impressed.  If this continues to work well, I’m going to uninstall DAMO and MobileMe.  Besides, I like the $29.95 one time charge for CompanionLink for Google over the $9.99 / month for MobileMe.

Paul Mooney doesn’t hate iNotes Ultralight…

Paul Mooney doesn’t hate iNotes Ultralight, and neither do I.  Kevin Hansen doesn’t hate it either.

Yes, the haters are out there in force, tearing Ed Brill and any other IBM’er they can get their hands on a new one.  We’d all like for Apple and IBM to get together and provide us with a solution that employs the native iPhone applications (mail, calendar, contacts), but IT JUST DOESN’T EXIST YET.  So it’s up to guys like us to figure out how we can integrate the iPhone in a Domino environment.  Naturally, we look to IBM.  So far, they have given us iNotes Ultralite.

Yes, it’s web mail.  Yes, it doesn’t integrate with the native applications on the iPhone.  Yes, you can’t add a calendar entry yet.  That being said, it just isn’t terrible.  It’s not wonderful either.  It’s not even great.  But it’s good.  Given the always-connected nature of the device, I really don’t see a huge problem with a web-based application.  By now, you’ve seen the screenshots.  If you haven’t joined Greenhouse and tried it, go there now.  This is a very well designed web application, built from the ground up to work on a small-form device.  I wonder if Android and/or Symbian devices take off, is IBM actually taking a good route?  It will be mighty difficult to keep up with every device and every device OS, but as long as it has a decent browser, it should be able to run this.

One of the biggest knocks against this is the lack of push e-mail.  Honestly, this is not a big deal to me.  Fortunately, I’m no longer in a position where I need to read every e-mail I receive as soon as it arrives.  But you may be.  There are certainly other members of our staff that are.  In this case, I’d forward copies all my mail to the SMS e-mail address (myphonenumber@cingularme.com) for the phone.  A bigger issue for me is calendar event notification.  Alan Lepofsky points out that, as long as you keep your Notes client open, you can have an e-mail sent as a reminder.  That’s certainly no worse than my current solution of keeping Outlook open at all times (ick).  Send that to your SMS address as well.  It would be nice if IBM would let you enable this via your preferences and make the calendar event notification run on the server instead of the client (if anyone knows how to do this, please post!).

We do not have a Domino 8 server set up at work yet, so I don’t want to do a thorough review of this yet.  But I have used the version hosted at Greenhouse, and so far I’m fairly impressed.  That’s not to say that Apple and IBM are off the hook.  Apple can’t ignore 40% + of the enterprise messaging market, and IBM can’t ignore tight integration with this device.

Interesting message from iTunes

iTunes Message

Uh, OK.  And what am I supposed to do with this?  Got this the other night when trying to sync with iTunes.  One three finger salute later and it was gone.