Lotusphere 2009: The Wednesday mobility press release (includes ActiveSync)

January 21 2009

This is the press release IBM issued early Wednesday covering new mobility and universal access updates:

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.

IBM today announced plans to support Microsoft Active Sync 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.
The support for ActiveSync has been widely discussed already.  It is planned for a future release of Lotus Notes Traveler.  We demonstrated it using an iPhone.  No ETA on beta, and other than "2009" we're not ready to indicate a ship date yet.  Very popular announcement -- I answered a ton of questions about it today (here and at the conference).  Some of the typical questions: Is there any additional cost or licensing?  Not planned, the Lotus Notes Traveler capability is included in a Notes or iNotes license.  What devices will it support?  ActiveSync is just a protocol.  Many devices support it.  Obviously, based on all the feedback this week, iPhone is our top priority.  How is it configured?  The way ActiveSync would be on a particular device.  For example, Zimbra's documentation of their ActiveSync support covers configuring it on an iPhone.  There have been other similar questions, and the answers are pending partner-type discussions with the device manufacturers.  The main takeaway point that I think you should get out of our demonstration and announcement is that this is technically possible and really has been for some time... while we are partial to open protocols like SyncML in this space and are by no means endorsing ActiveSync, we are being pragmatic given the customer demand and are determined to move this forward.  Of course, iNotes Ultra-Light mode continues to be an option on many of these devices starting with Domino 8.5 as well.

The other parts of this announcement are important, too.  Symbian support via the existing Lotus Notes Traveler is being expanded to Samsung devices.  Carriers Orange and Verizon signed up to support Lotus Notes Traveler, and their promotion will help raise awareness of Notes/Domino and mobility with their customers.  As Kevin Cavanaugh and I have told many of you, partnership-based marketing is definitely one of our objectives for Notes/Domino at this time, and these kinds of announcements really help amplify the message coming out of our own team.

Ed Brill Lotusphere 2009 Category: Add/View Comments [5]

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  1. 1  Niels Jørgen Hansen  | 1/22/2009 2:48:29 AM

    Good stuff. Dare I ask for support on Ericsson phones as well? Still pretty strong presence in Europe, although I am not sure where they are going with their Symbian support now that Nokia has full ownership of that platform. Customer demand is certainly still there.

  1. 2  Peter Wilson  | 1/22/2009 5:06:12 AM

    Maybe Lotus can get their logo alongside Exchange on { Link } ? So people realise there are alternatives....

  1. 3  Craig Wiseman http://www.Wiseman.La/cpw | 1/22/2009 8:17:58 AM

    An amazing annoucement. I'm tickled pink, thanks for letting pragmatism win. I know it's not the best feeling sometimes, but it really is in the .customers'. best interest.

    Could you stuff more stuff into one week?

  1. 4  Ken Yee http://www.keysolutions.com/blogs/kenyee.nsf | 1/22/2009 11:06:59 AM

    I've always wondered why you guys didn't just do an ActiveSync shim to make Domino look like an Exchange server.

    Thanks for announcing this. I was just about done researching what would be needed for this and would have been bummed if you announced this when I was halfway through implementing it ;-)

  1. 5  Michael LaPoint  | 1/23/2009 3:50:23 PM

    Ed,

    I raised some issues in one of the Mac sessions about the current solution for the iPhone. Another participant mentioned the ActiveSync support in Notes Traveler. I can't say how glad I am to hear this. I found the current Ultra Lite version of iNotes to be quite unacceptable since it relies so heavily on the active connection to the server.

    Thank you for that news!

    Mike