Gregg Eldred

Of the many announcements coming from Lotusphere 2009, there were two that I found particularly interesting. The first:

The announcements with Orange, Samsung and Verizon Wireless are a key part of IBM's work to expand its collaboration sales channel to global device and telecommunications carriers. Verizon Wireless and Orange will give their mobile network customers access to IBM Lotus Notes and Domino software on their hand-held devices, expanding Lotus email access up to 85 million users across the US on the Verizon network and 113 million users across Europe on the Orange network. Both wireless carriers are certifying support for IBM Lotus Notes Traveler software, which enables wireless replication of Lotus Notes email, calendaring, and personal information management (PIM) data on select smartphones.

Leading mobile device producer Samsung, will also support IBM Lotus Notes Traveler software. This will enable millions of Samsung smartphone customers to manage their Lotus Notes email, calendars and address books anytime, anywhere.

Bringing support to Traveler for Orange, Samsung, and Verizon customers is huge, in that if you work in an environment that requires support of different carriers and devices, Traveler will soon be able to support your customers. Think colleges and universities, for example. All those students will shortly be able to access their mail using their current carrier. It may even make Lotus Notes and Domino a better choice for messaging. for higher education.

The announcement that Lotus was supporting Active Sync was one that I was privileged to attend as part of the Blogger Program.

IBM today announced plans to support Exchange ActiveSync in a future version of Lotus Notes Traveler. This support will extend automatic synching capabilities for email and calendaring tools to a new range of popular mobile devices. This support is part of IBM's pledge to provide enterprises the choice and flexibility to select the mobile devices and carriers that best suit their needs.

This, too, is great news, as it means native support on the iPhone. But the interesting facet of this is how you setup your connection to your mail. On the iPhone, which of these options will you use?



If you chose "Microsoft Exchange," you would be correct. This may prove to be confusing to some users and could cause some interesting conversations, but the fact that you will now get your mail, contacts, calendar, and more, on your iPhone or other mobile device, "natively," (including Palm) is excellent news. Will Notes support the forthcoming Palm Pre? It will if the Pre supports ActiveSync. Most older smartphones support Exchange ActiveSync, like my Treo 755p, which should make all of your users happy. Instead of having these users purchase an additional software package to synch, you will be able to do it all using Domino 8.x and Traveler. And you can provide a solution for your iPhone users. How cool is that?

Link: IBM Makes Collaboration Easier, Faster and Universally Accessible

Link: The iPhone Blog: Switching to iPhone: How To Move Your Contacts, Calendar, Email, Bookmarks, and Photos to the iPhone - Wait-a-Thon!

Link: Apple Support: Exchange ActiveSync

Technorati tag: Traveler ActiveSync Lotus Notes

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