Since I last harassed you with my text, I've made a major change to my e-life: I purchased an iPhone.
Yes, for most of you, this comes as a shock on the order of the Detroit Lions winning the Super Bowl, but I have indeed gone over to the "other side." And I have to tell you, with a few minor nuisance items, I couldn't be happier.
The items I'm referring to, however, have been little short of showstoppers, I must admit. Again, we're stuck with Lotus Notes as our collaboration solution at work, and it's been the biggest thorn in the side of anyone who wants to use anything other than a Crapberry for their mobile device. To make matters worse, corporate has completely locked out remote access to e-mail through anything other than the Dingleberry Enterprise Server. This presents a challenge of a pretty fair magnitude: how do I keep my contacts, calendar, and e-mail synced between the desktop and the mobile device?
To be honest, it's been a royal pain in the ass. I'm still playing around with a few options -- and trying to keep myself limited to free/low-cost solutions limits those options a bit more -- but I'm starting to get comfortable with the awkward way I have to do things.
Contacts: mobileMe.
I don't even bother with keeping those in sync with Notes. To be honest, I prefer not to, because many of my contacts on my phone are personal, and I don't want them in a database on my work machine. These get replicated to my Vista machine at home via mobileMe, and that's just fine.
E-mail: auto-forward
This is where things get a little stupid. I set up a rule in Lotus Notes to automatically forward a copy of ANY incoming e-mail to my mobileMe account (which is a true push e-mail solution). I've found that my corporate e-mail arrives on my iPhone at the same time as it does on the Crackberry devices my co-workers use, so I'm not missing anything. My problem is that if I want to reply to message, it goes out through the mobileMe address rather than my corporate e-mail address. Additionally, it does not get forwarded to my corporate account, so I have no record of sent e-mails on my desktop. I don't want this, but without corporate opening up a port to the outside world, it's the only option I've found so far. It ain't pretty, but it works, and I'm still in touch with the goings-on in the office even when I'm not there.
Calendar: gCal
If you've been following the trend, you can probably speculate that my troubles here are the worst. This isn't so much the fault of Lotus Notes as it is the iPhone (and, more specifically, Apple), because the system calendar is not available to third-party applications for modification. My current solution is another e-mail forward: any Notes calendar item gets forwarded to my gMail account. (It appears as a *.ics iCal attachment, which gMail and gCal properly recognize.) The bad part about this is that I have yet to find a way to get gMail to automatically import these calendar files as gCal events, so I have to manually open gMail to accept and confirm these events. However, once they are there, I can have gCal send out my meeting reminders as SMS messages, so I still get notifications 15 minutes before the metting starts (and don't miss any more meetings).
The above solution would actually work well for any standard phone, not necessarily a smart phone, but it's a really ratty way around a problem that shouldn't exist.
There is a product called CompanionLink that will sync Notes events with gCal, but I'm opting not to spend the money on it just yet, as I believe there may be a way to get this to happen seamlessly for free.
The crux of the matter is that we are far enough along in the development of mobile devices that there really should be a standard for these things. The Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD war didn't last a fraction of this long, retarded, silent war, so why are we still putzing around with proprietary synchronization methods? Mobile phones need to sync with collaboration software. Period. Make it happen, people.
