Vendors Go Gaga for iPhone at Lotusphere

January 26, 2010 Alex Woodie

Getting Lotus Notes content on your mobile phone was all the rage at least week’s LotusSphere conference in Florida. IBM kicked things off by announcing the capability for users to securely send and receive e-mail on the iPhone with its new Lotus Notes Traveler Companion software. But IBM wasn’t the only vendor going gaga for all things mobile at the annual gathering of Notes and Domino professionals.

Lotus Notes is no newbie to the mobile phone craze. In 2008, IBM unveiled Lotus Notes Traveler to fill the gap between the full Notes client, which requires the computing power of a full PC, and the ultralight iNotes client, which runs as a Web client, but is limited in functionality. Traveler gained support for the iPhone in the fall of 2008, and the software also supports RIM Blackberry and Nokia Symbian smart phones.

IBM made several announcements concerning Traveler last week. For starters, the company indicated that a future release of Traveler will support e-mail, calendaring, and contacts on Android versions 2 and 2.1, the new Google mobile phone OS that is challenging Blackberry and the iPhone in the mobile computing popularity contest.

IBM also announced Lotus Notes Traveler Companion, a new iPhone software product that adds encryption to the e-mail functionality of Traveler. The Companion product requires Traveler version 8.5.1, and is already available on the iTunes App Store, IBM says.

There was also some news for those who prefer Nokia’s Symbian smart phones. IBM already supported the mobile platform with a slew of Notes, Domino, and WebSphere products. But in the future, Symbian users will be able to load Lotus Sametime onto the software and begin using it for unified collaboration, including presence awareness and click-to-call functionality. This should be available by the end of the year, IBM says.

Also making iPhone-related announcements at Lotusphere last week were iEnterprises and Good Technology.

iEnterprises, which develops CRM software for the System i and other Domino-supporting platforms, announced a new product called Mobile Edge that allows users to access various Lotus Notes applications from the comfort of their iPhones.

The smart client enables Notes developers to configure and deploy existing Notes applications to iPhones or other mobile phones without developing new applications that are optimized for the mobile devices. The software requires Domino 6.0 or higher and supports the latest Domino 8.5.1 release.

Good Technology, meanwhile, announced the launch of Good for Enterprise iPhone, which allows users to securely access the messaging and collaboration functions of their Lotus Notes environments from their iPhones.

Good for Enterprises includes its own e-mail client for the iPhone and other mobile phones. But the real juice for Good–which was formed when push e-mail technology developer VISTO bought a division of mobile device manufacturer Motorola–appears to be the administrative tools that implement order across a company’s mobile phones. These functions include remote wipe capabilities, on-device data encryption, and the capability to manage all devices from a single, Web-based management console.