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.

Ken Gartner, reporting from the monthly NE Lotus User Group meeting. (Caution technical lingo ahead.)

Last night was the September meeting of the NE Lotus User Group in Waltham, MA.  A good turnout overall with a nice mixture of Domino customers, partners and IBM’ers.  The technical presentation was about DAOS as it appears in Domino 8.5 and the big improvements now in Domino 8.5.1.   Not only was the subject matter well-received by the audience generally — who doesn’t like to save more than 40% on their storage and backup costs? — but being able to discuss technical aspects was especially nice for us.  We had a lot to contribute, based on our own experience with large enterprise customers.

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A few days old, but noteworthy: In an interesting twist, IBM announced the availability of the latest version of Notes/Domino at Macworld, only two weeks ahead of Lotusphere – IBM’s own product showcase held annually in Orlando.

I think, this signals two things:

1. IBM acknowledges the growing popularity of the Mac, and its increasing usage worldwide. Macworld in particular is a great venue to connect with real end-users, many of which may not even know that Notes still exists. The success of MS-Exchange has been largely driven by the ubiquitous nature of Outlook, and IBM must rebuild end-user awareness and street-cred to regain market share.
2. Lotus is hoping to leverage years of heavy investment in Eclipse, which gives Notes instant cross-platform capabilities and feature parity on non-Wintel systems, including the Mac and of course Linux.

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Another chapter in the saga surrounding millions of missing White House emails was written this week, when judge John Facciola ordered the Bush administration to collect and preserve all emails stored in .pst files including data copied onto portable media such as flash drives.

While there are many theories about the missing emails, reaching from government conspiracy to sheer incompetence, I would side with the latter.

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In a move that may bring more business credibility to the iPhone, IBM is expected to announce formally next week at Lotusphere the availability of a mobile version of Notes specifically tailored for the cool Apple gadget.

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Alan Lepofsky just uncovered a neat new feature in Notes 8 that may save some of us from those embarrassing blind carbon copy (bcc) mistakes. The Notes client now automatically removes the reply-to-all option for emails that the recipient received as a blind copy.

“So now in Notes 8 when you are Bcc’d on an email, you can no longer embarrassingly reply to everyone, considering they (everyone but the original sender) did not know you received the email in the first place!”

Careful though, you can still use reply-to-all for that message directly from your inbox.

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