Variety Comes to Mobile Users of Lotus Notes/Domino

Published: January 24, 2006

by Dan Burger

As handheld messaging devices continue to stretch their usefulness beyond e-mail, the fact remains that most users are limiting the requirements to simply e-mail and, to a lesser degree, instant messaging. Stories of business people in the field gaining important new functionality such as being tied to back-end applications are not yet what anyone would consider commonplace despite the hype weighing heavily in that direction. However, higher performance and more product choices proliferate. For mobile users in the Lotus Notes/Domino camp, there is good news streaming from the Lotusphere conference and trade show this week in Orlando.

Among the vendors with product announcements that play well with the mobile-minded business professional making use of Lotus collaboration are Intellisync, Research in Motion, Good Technology, and Nokia.

Intellisync has bumped up the capabilities for mobile professionals to communicate and work more effectively by addressing security, the most pressing issue in mobile computing. IT managers are facing a monster when it comes to mobile security, so Intellisync, a wireless data synchronization provider, is offering several applications and reports that allow security measures to be provisioned, updated, and managed over the air. Management functions are an Intellisync hallmark and it has added the capability to protect proprietary data by locking down lost or stolen handheld devices.

The software is compatible with the latest version of Notes/Domino 7, as well as R5 and R6 versions. It is expected to be generally available in the first quarter of 2006. Similar software, with the same availability release date, will be compatible with Microsoft Exchange and Novell Groupwise. All share the same server front end, with changes to the back ends and the clients that are accessible.

The Intellisync Mobile Suite (IMS) server runs on Windows and uses the IOP interfaces to Domino, it connects to other Domino servers running on other platforms, including iSeries, in order to get content. Pricing has not been established yet.

Blair Hankins, senior vice president of technology at Intellisync, says his company has accelerated its investment in Domino, which has resulted in better integration. One area he points to is the redesign of the meeting-management and exception-handling functionality to match what Domino does in these areas.

Hankins also emphasized a performance enhancement that speeds data retrieval and brings higher scalability with less impact on the Domino server as data is pulled to the IMS server. "We have a term called 'mean time to vibrate' (new e-mail typically alerts a user by generating a vibration in the handheld device) that means how quickly does an e-mail that is received on a user's server get forwarded to the user's wireless device. Our goal is to get that time down to around a minute. In order to achieve that, we implemented a faster protocol between the IMS server and the client. We developed a way to pull more frequently and with a lighter bandwidth, so updates can be sent out more quickly while bandwidth is not negatively impacted."

Not long ago, the industry standard for updating e-mails to wireless devices was approximately every 15 minutes. Improvements in this area, by Intellisync and others, now have e-mail updates occurring every few minutes.

Additional features that are arriving with this latest IMS release include full sub-folder support that replicates the user-defined hierarchy based on the user's Notes email folders and storage, expanded client support, an option for choosing to view complete attachments or partial attachments in cases where the complete attachment might become a bandwidth hog.

Research In Motion (RIM) also chose Lotusphere as an appropriate time to introduce its BlackBerry Enterprise Server v4.1 for IBM Lotus Domino. Compared to the current server, v4.1 will add support for Lotus Sametime and Domino 7.

RIM has also made security enhancements a priority feature by adding the capability to read Notes native encrypted mail (Lotus Domino encrypted mail) on BlackBerry handheld devices. Also of importance is the newly added support for IBM DB2.

Features added to the Sametime client for BlackBerry include, group chat, buddy-list synchronization with the Sametime server, message auditing, and enterprise access controls.

RIM currently faces some serious challenges in a patent infringement case.

Also making the best of a made-for-Lotus-users moment was Nokia, which announced its mobile application platform, Nokia Business Center (NBC), will support (surprise, surprise) IBM Lotus Notes and Domino servers. The software enables collaborative business applications, starting with the biggest factor in mobile business collaboration, which is email. Nokia Business Center for Notes/Domino is expected to be available during the first quarter.

NBC provides organizations with two options: basic push e-mail and a professional-grade client. It supports mobile e-mail over ten Nokia smartphones and communicators.

Good Technology, another wireless messaging company, has also lined up to present its soon-to-be-delivered software that will support Notes and Domino. The company has indicated it will stress security with both email and enterprise applications in the Lotus environment.