Overview: Lotus Notes Comes to the iPhone
When Apple’s iPhone 3G was announced, Apple made a big deal about supporting Enterprise email. The problem for Lotus Notes users was that “Enterprise” initially only meant Microsoft Exchange. And while that hasn’t changed for built-in iPhone connectivity, IBM has made Lotus Notes on the iPhone a reality with Lotus iNotes Ultralite.
IBM Lotus iNotes Ultralite is a web application that you access through the mobile Safari web browser on the iPhone. You go to the same URL you are used to for normal webmail access, and the email template is smart enough to serve up a mobile browser optimized version of your Lotus Notes.
Lotus iNotes Ultralite Homepage
Notes Ultralite includes access to the following pieces of your Lotus Notes:
When you access your inbox, you can read all of your messages (including rich text HTML messages,) reply, forward and create new emails. You can move the message to the trash or even take already read messages and mark them as unread.Your inbox
The Sent mail view
The All Documents view
Your trash folder
Your Day At A Glance daily calendar
Your Contacts
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FurlDuring these transactions, you are actually accessing your live email file on the server so changes are instantaneous.
Lotus iNotes Ultralite Inbox
In addition to the normal email functions associated with the Inbox, you can scroll through everything you’ve Sent from Lotus Notes and you can also view every document in your entire mail file by going into the All Documents view. Lastly, you have the ability to look at anything you’ve deleted within the last 48 hours by checking the Trash folder.
Access to these basic functions are pretty decent, but there are a couple caveats. First, you have no way of seeing your folders or moving email to a specific folder within Lotus Notes. That means that if you have an email saved in a particular folder and not the inbox, the only way to find it is by checking the All Documents folder.
That in itself wouldn’t normally be much of a problem, but there is no Search function within iNotes Ultralite. This causes a problem if you have to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. Trying to find a message out of thousands in your All Documents folder without being able to search takes too much time. It CAN be done, but it’s fairly tedious.
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TAGS:
collaboration, iPhone, Lotus Notes, e-Mail
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