Location : Cleveland, OH
I was fortunate to attend Rob Wunderlich and Jason Hook's session, BP211 The Return of Delivering IBM Lotus Domino Applications to Mobile Devices. The prompting for this session review is a comment that I recently received from Dmitry, who asked:
I was wondering if you know of a 3rd party software that allows you to sync the Lotus Notes database to the blackberry via BES the same way the email is being replicated to the blackberry?
Hopefully, my notes from the session will be beneficial, along with some links that Rob and Jason threw at us.
The first item of interest is notesberry.org and dominounplugged.com.
How can you deliver Domino applications to a handheld? There are several methods:
Sync to the device - bring data down to the handheld
Browse - use HTTP and the micro browser in the handheld.
RSS
SMS
The Blackberry method - connecting when you need the information.
They broke, somewhere in this discussion deliver a demo. From what I remember, they sent a message, via SMS, to the device. It was generated off of a form in the Domino application. They also showed bbmetablog, which I knew about but didn't really understand. It was . . . cool! And now I "get it." This, alone, was worth the price of admission.
Another link that was given to the attendees: openCOD. This is an open source initiative to deliver back-end data to Blackberry devices. All of the demo databases are stored on openCOD.
Another demo of hitting your Domino sites using the micro browser. What should you take away from the demo? Size matters, your forms need to go on a diet, and you want to use a lot of keywords and very little fill-ins. Remember who may be hitting your site.
Another link was given, Bill Buchan's articles for LotusUserGroup. From LotusUserGroup.org:
Check out each part of the article below to get the fundamentals of publishing Domino data onto a BlackBerry handset, capitalize on the BlackBerry MDS Studio, discover tips for enhancing applications, learn the process of deploying applications to your corporate BlackBerries, and dive into the more advanced BlackBerry development tool - the JDE.
I never thought about serving up Domino data to mobile devices using RSS, but this looks like it has a lot of benefit. Domino 7 and 8 ship with an RSS Feed Generator database that you can immediately leverage.
After a discussion and demo of using SMS (think Help Desk ticket escalations and emergencies), Rob and Jason dove into developing applications for handhelds. Like I said previously:
Size matters
Forms on a diet (they reduced a Contact/Person Doc to one screen on the Blackberry)
Use Keywords
In addition to those items, as a developer you should move your agents to the backend. Run things after a form has been submitted or modified. Have other agents that fill in data once the key pieces have been entered. Don't use a lot of graphics (if any). They talked about @GetHTTPHeader and an address like mobile.yourdomain.com. I have to admit that they kind of lost me, as I don't do a lot of web development, but some of you may know what they mean. Allow more time for developing your application for a handheld, as there are more things to consider.
They also mentioned that the rules are about to change, with the release of Lotus Traveler, Expeditor, and new standards (like SyncML and SoDA).
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