IBM Lotus just recently released Lotus Traveler 8.51 which provides support for a wide range of mobile devices, but most importantly the iPhone.

I’m sure there was a collective sigh amongst Domino admins, getting their iPhone touting execs back onto corporate email. But the catch-up game continues, as the cool new Droid arrives on the scene. Traveler doesn’t yet officially support Android devices, although both Traveler and Android have ActiveSync support. Ed Brill mentioned on his blog that Android support is coming, but what to do in the meantime? There are a number of 3rd party apps that can bridge the gap – Touchdown by NitroDesk is one of them.

The droidStory blog has a post on how to get it working and the trade-offs and compromises of the solution.

The latest version of Lotus Notes Traveler that has shipped with the recent release of Lotus Domino 8.51 now natively supports the iPhone and many other prevalent mobile platforms such as Windows Mobile and Symbian.

This is long awaited relief for corporate iPhone users, since the previously announced Domino “integration” was a rather underwhelming light web client, missing crucial offline capabilities.

Lotus Traveler now provides full push-email, calendar and contact synchronization that enables the user to work offline. In addition, new enterprise features like remote wipe, to erase data on lost or stolen phones, are critical to gain corporate acceptance.

It is good to see that IBM Lotus is finally closing this critical gap in mobile integration.  Support for these new mobile devices and the already existing, strong integration with the Blackberry enables Lotus Notes Domino for the vast majority of all smartphones currently available.