You’ve probably already read this, but just in case you’re late to the party…  check it out.

Great news!

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.

See below

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.