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.