I was just reading Jens Bruntt's blog entry from last week, "Android synci'ing PIM with Lotus Traveler: TouchDown". This is just days after I held an internal review to discuss our plans for Lotus Notes Traveler in 8.5.2 and beyond. I can't blog those plans yet, but a portion of the discussion covered what our plans should be for support for Notes Traveler on Android-based devices.
The philosophy with Lotus Notes Traveler has been to leverage built-in capabilities on the devices that are supported. In some cases, we install a small shim program to handle communications to Domino, but we don't build mail/calendar/contacts applications. For the Apple iPhone, we use the native experience 100% (though in the future, we may build add-ons that enhance the built-in capabilities).
Android-based phones present a different challenge. The base operating system has only just added an an "Exchange" (ActiveSync) mail client in the 2.0 SDK. More to the point, since Android is an open platform, we will see different device manufacturers elect to include or exclude different components from their implementations, or choose to build their own, or implement third-party, solutions for different functionality. There's also a gap in that the base 2.0 Android kit does not include a calendar implementation, though presumably most device manufacturers will include a calendar component on their devices.
Jens's blog entry talks about a third-party Android product that implements email, calendar, and contacts for "Exchange". Jens has not tried the product but one of the comments on his site says "it works!". This is good news and another testimonial to the Notes Traveler 8.5.1 implementation, even though obviously this won't be an officially-supported configuration.
At any rate, it looks like Android's momentum is increasing -- Gartner predicts that Android will be the #2 mobile phone operating system by 2012, behind Symbian. (Blackberry and iPhone follow in 3rd and 4th...and Windows Mobile is in 5th and declining. Some are even writing Windows Mobile off) Given that, I want to make sure that we bring Notes Traveler to the Android sooner rather than later. The problem is that the different implementations, distributions, and capabilities are going to make this much more difficult than other mobile platforms we support. Microsoft is facing the same challenge for Exchange -- for a change, they are not the first and default experience in a mobile operating system. Calendar especially looks like a place where there will be little consistency. We're working on some options now, but it's a good opportunity to ask -- what would you like to see for Android?
ibm.com: IBM Helps Construction Firm Boost Number of Clients by 40% Through Mobile Real-Time Trends Analysis
Wed, Sep 1st 2010 5:34p Ed Brill 250 employees, growing their number of clients by 40% through using Domino, iEnterprises' CRM solution, and Blackberry...This allows project managers to improve decision making, shorten sales cycles and significantly increased new business by making client interactions and client contact information accessible to all project managers through their smartphones. Besides an increase in new clients by 40 percent, up from the year prior, VCC has also seen an average savings of 400 employee hours per [read] Keywords: domino
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Bye bye blogroll
Tue, Aug 31st 2010 8:40p Ed Brill It's been a long time since I thought about my blogroll or, for that matter, really paid attention to anyone else's. I find blogs today through PlanetLotus (and there are a number of new ones found there), Google alerts, Twitter and Facebook links, and our internal implementation of Lotus Connections. So, rather than inadvertently offend someone not included, or consider whether the links there are still relevant, I've blown it away. I put it on a hidden page for now, and suppose I can resurf [read] Keywords: connections
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New widget on ibm.com Notes/Domino pages highlights plug-in partners
Mon, Aug 30th 2010 10:34a Ed Brill We added a small rotating widget to the ibm.com/lotus/notes and ibm.com/lotus/domino product pages to highlight our key Notes plug-in partners: Gist, Tungle, FewClix, TripIt, and OpenSpan. See here in red: The goal is to increase awareness of these value-add tools that are available to showcase the power of the Notes 8.x client. Link: ibm.com/lotus/notes > [read] Keywords: domino
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Need your help - updated Notes/Domino virtualization survey
Mon, Aug 30th 2010 10:30a Ed Brill It's been about a year since the last time we did this, and this time, we want to know about both client- and server-side virtualization technologies. This area is moving fast and not a week goes by without a request for us to support some new virtualization technology. VMWare and Citrix remain the most frequently-asked, but there are now half dozen others mentioned regularly. The survey will only take about ten minutes to fill out; you need an IBM.com ID in order to do so. Sample question [read] Keywords: domino
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Lotus Symphony 3 beta 4 now available
Fri, Aug 27th 2010 9:49a Ed Brill Yesterday, we posted Lotus Symphony 3 beta 4, what should be the last beta of the Symphony 3 cycle. You can download it from here. Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 adds some exciting new enhancements. We've focused on performance. In addition we've enabled the support for adding additional spell check dictionaries into the product and added support for VML images. We've done some additional work around installation to support a silent installation option for Windows. We've added some enhancements to t [read] Keywords: lotus
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Update on Lotus Notes Traveler for Android
Fri, Aug 27th 2010 9:37a Ed Brill Now that Notes/Domino 8.5.2 is out, a few questions have trickled in about the status of the Notes Traveler client for Android. To refresh, we announced at Lotusphere that we would build our own Notes Traveler client for the Android 2.x OS -- supporting mail, calendar, contacts. We knew that the Android OS would evolve to have some of these capabilities in the base OS, but enterprise calendaring and other features just aren't there; plus, different devices using Android use different sets o [read] Keywords: calendaring
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The Calendar of the Future | A manifesto from Tungle.me
Wed, Aug 25th 2010 9:20a Ed Brill Yesterday, Tungle debuted a site called "The Calendar of the Future | A Manifesto". The site features interviews with Tungle's team and industry experts, including Robert Scoble, Google's Don Dodge, LinkedIn's Ellen Levy, Facebook's Michael Brown, me, and others. I am honored to be in the copy of smart, visionary people on these videos. They are well worth 15 minutes of your time. Part of the reason I was so excited to participate in the Manifesto was my long ties to enterprise calendari [read] Keywords: calendaring
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Notes and Domino 8.5.2 release now available!
Tue, Aug 24th 2010 11:00a Ed Brill As announced on August 10, the new Notes and Domino 8.5.2 release arrived earlier today, along with service availability of LotusLive Notes. Notes/Domino 8.5.2 is a release primarily about reliability -- lots of fixes -- but with incremental improvements in the Notes client and significant forward progress for developers in Domino Designer. The blogs are buzzing about the release, and some of the Design Partners and beta participants have blogged over the last few months about key new featur [read] Keywords: domino
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Score one for the Lotus blogging community; ibm.com has been updated
Sat, Aug 21st 2010 11:10p Ed Brill Back before my vacation, a few bloggers were talking about the abrasive, mixed message that IBM was sending to the market by having a web page from ibm.com Global Technology Services describing their Notes to Exchange migration offering. My stance at the time was that IBM, as a portfolio business that is dedicated to every client's success, should be the best possible systems integrator for Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, or whomever else in our GTS business, even while we are competing with those co [read] Keywords: ibm
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