Ed Brill

Julian noticed discussion of the new Notes Mail portlet in a recent developerWorks article on Domino and Workplace integration:

Here's what I think is really good about the concept of the Notes Mail Portlet (keeping in mind that I haven't tested it myself, just read about it):

• accessing your Notes mail through a true portlet (as opposed to iNotes in an IFrame) means that you can skin your mail interface and make it look and act like the rest of your portal
• using Notes as a mail backend should (hopefully) mean that it'll be that much easier to integrate Notes mail into your other portlets for workflow functionality
• according to the article, "feature enhancements are planned for future releases of the Notes Mail portlet, including calendar support," which means that this is just phase one of some real integration with Notes mail/calendar/schedule functionality

I'm not sure if this is a Lotus Workplace only kind of portlet, or if it works in WebSphere Portal too,..

• The portlet will become "the common PIM portlet" -- providing mail and calendar services
• It will evolve to run in both Lotus Workplace and in WebSphere Portal
• It will evolve to support the following back-ends: Lotus Domino, Lotus Workplace Messaging, and Microsoft Exchange.