Lotus Notes makes a play for iPhone users with mobile e-mail
Beyond its previously available native support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, the Apple iPhone's business stature jumped up another notch this week with a free application dubbed iNotes ultralite from IBM's Lotus division.
While Apple's App Store has been rejecting applications from smaller developers, a new iNotes Web application from IBM's Lotus is one piece of software being enthusiastically welcomed into the iPhone fold.
Announced Tuesday, the new app, known as iNotes ultralite, is designed to let mobile corporate employees use Apple's Safari browser for accessing their Notes e-mail, contact info, and calendars on their iPhones. It's an extension of IBM's existing Domino Web Access technology, using a front end that's more suitable to the iPhone's touch environment.
For iPhone users make use of iNotes ultralite, iPhone users must also be Lotus Notes subscribers. This way, they can get ultralite by downloading Notes 8.0.2, since they can't get the application from Apple's App Store. Lotus suggests that iPhone users connect to their enterprise servers using iNotes ultralite in conjunction with Lotus Mobile Connect VPN software.
Although iNotes ultralite will certainly broaden out corporate e-mail access to a wider population, in the US, it's Microsoft Exchange that has defined enterprise connectivity.
Specifically, Exchange currently holds about a 65% share of the business/organization e-mail market in the US, with Notes Domino in second place at only 10% and RFC-822 e-mail servers such as Sendmail, Qmail, and Postfix combined accounting for 15%, according to a recent survey by analyst firm Ferris Research.
Lotus is offering this new client at a time of increasing overlap between corporate and consumer phone makers.
For example, earlier this month, Nokia announced that it is outfitting all 43 of its S60 3rd Edition phones with a new Mail for Exchange mobile e-mail application, which adds support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, a capability that, when enabled on Exchange servers, enables push delivery of e-mail, calendar, and contacts.
The iPhone, for its part, began supporting Microsoft Exchange's ActiveSync through a feature added during June of this year in iPhone 2.0 software. Also through that software release, iPhone users received more secure access to corporate data through Cisco IPSecVPN and Wi-Fi services.
Despite the hype surrounding this week's announcement, support has long been available to varying degrees for accessing both Lotus Notes/Domino and Microsoft Exchange environments on other manufacturers' mobile phones.
Way back in the year 2000, for example, Lotus and Nokia announced Domino Everyplace Quick Start, a version of Lotus' Domino that incorporated Nokia's earlier Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) server to give mobile corporate users Domino authentication, personally configured WAP portals, customized menus for different user groups, and "WAP-based Domino e-mail, calendar, to-do lists and corporate directories."
Earlier this year, RIM released a product called BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Connections, which is touted as providing the same features for information collaboration available to desktop users of Lotus Connections, including Profiles, for finding subject experts in their corporations, and Dogear Social Bookmarks, for accessing research recommended by co-workers.