A friend of mine (who I didn’t realize was blog-stalking me until she admitted to doing it) recently sent me an email simply saying: “Really?! Just like that, you’re going to ditch Notes for Exchange - all because of the iPhone?!”

Not exactly.

I won’t go on and on again about how I feel that IBM/Lotus is totally missing the boat on the iPhone thing. Instead, let’s focus on the facts. Various statements (from IBM/Lotus employees) have offered the following options/statements regarding Notes-iPhone integration:

• A) DWA-uber-lite
• B) Call APPLE and complain
• C) A 3rd party solution (of which there are many - but all fall short of what was shown in the Apple/Exchange demo, which brings us to…
• D) Quickly pointing out that the Exchange product has only be demoed, not shipped
• E) All of the above

Now, as a senior executive in our organization, my job is to look at trends and plot the course of how our company will deal with emerging technologies and general business developments/directions. While, I can’t (easily) picture our company WITHOUT Lotus Notes, I also CAN (easily) see a wide-spread adoption of the iPhone. I’ve tested many (MANY!) phones and this is the first one to get so many things right and still be so easy to use.

… with one HUGE exception: its ability to integration with Notes.

Normally, that’s a show stopper. We’d exclude the device from consideration and move on to the next one. But in the case of the iPhone, I simply can’t. Its such a powerful device, easy to use and gives people the ability to have so many tools easily at their fingertips. Let’s also not forget: its fun! And that’s a big deal! In a world where we are all available 24/7 by emails, voicemails and text messages; we’re tied to this device anyway - so why not make it at least partially fun for us to carry! When I’m traveling, not only am I still completely in contact with the office, I’m also listening to music, watching videos or catching up on podcasts.

Back to trends and developments… another big one for us is a movement to web-based applications. They’re easier to access, often more powerful and quickly replacing a fleet of locally replicated databases that need to be updated each time we connect before we can start using them.

So… if I already have access to the internet everywhere; if my applications are web-based; if I’m carrying a single device that connects me to those applications and my email/calendar/contacts and, by the way, its fun to use - then why do I need my Notes client? The answer: only for databases we haven’t yet web-enabled.

In this model, Exchange can easily replace Domino for users who don’t require the Notes client for Notes-based applications. In our case, there are many groups or divisions where it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to make this jump; which makes it that much easier to consider when I try to find a way to integrate iPhones into the organization.

Hopefully that helps explain our situation. You can extend this even further by saying that other Lotus products (like Quickr - which we’re also evaluating) aren’t the natural “no brainer” they once might have been simply because we’re already a “Notes shop.” If that’s the case (and it is) then its my duty to more closely evaluate competitive products because the value-add of having tight Notes integration is less today than it was a few years ago.

At the end of the day, I don’t want to move anyone off Notes/Domino; certainly not for Exchange! Ugh! But… the iPhone is the single most important device to hit the market for a long time and its just getting started. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t see the potential there and look for ways to integrate this powerful (and now reasonably priced) tool into our organization.

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A comment from my last blog entry suggested that it was difficult to post on my site from a Blackberry. Being an iPhone user, I’ve never really had any problems. Still, I thought I’d try to see if I could improve the DominoKeys mobile experience.

I’ll be testing a few tools over the next week or two and report back on a winner. The first one is up now and so far I really like it. Of course, it is heavily designed for the iPhone.
Incase you’d like it, its called MobileAdmin.

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Its no coincidence that I blogged about the lack of an iPhone/Domino solution from IBM one week after the WWDC keynote. I made myself wait that long - to calm down.
I thought I’d counter my “Exchange tendencies” with a quick mention of some positive things IBM is doing around the IBM product:

1. New Wikis are available for products like Quickr, Sametime and Domino (among others). This is a GREAT idea and a great way to allow customers to participate in things like “best practices” documentation and learning. Brilliant, Lotus!
2.  There’s a new Notes/Domino page on ibm.com. I think this looks really nice - and is much more like something I thought they should have done with the release of 8.0. My biggest compliment: its not over-cluttered with technospeak wrapped in managerialesque-ness. (You know, stuff like “Notes/Domino is the premier collaboration platform based on Eclipse technology which is designed to reduce your TCO through powerful industry standard tools and compliance based rapid application blah blah blah…”)
3. After following the link (on page in #2 above) to read more about Domino Web Access, I saw my biggest surprise yet: a picture of an iPhone with a dedicated page all about how to get this thing to work in the enterprise!

…to my surprise, they didn’t tell people to go buy Exchange. No, they had a whole set of images and descriptions posted that talk about an offering from IBM to tie your iPhone to Lotus Notes. Sure, there’s no ETA (other than “PLANNED for delivery in 2008″). Sure, there’s no mention of push email, calendar or to-do’s. Sure, there’s no mention of administration tools, encryption or how easy it’ll be to set up - but hey, they mentioned it.

I’ll place my bets now on the following predictions:

• LATE 2008 delivery, as a beta
• Uses DWA super-lite
• Requires you to authenticate (on your iPhone)
• No push
• No administration tools (remote setup, remote disable, encryption, etc.)

Go ahead… tell me I’m wrong. I’d LOVE to be wrong. Please!

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With the thought “actions speak louder than words” in mind, I’m not going to talk (again) about how disappointing it is that IBM/Lotus doesn’t have an announcement about a product that would make the iPhone and Domino work as well together as the demos of the iPhone and Exchange appear to work. I’m not going to comment on how frustrating it is to watch IBM/Lotus bloggers tell people to contact Apple and request the functionality. Instead, I’m going to tell you what we are actually doing:

This month, an Exchange server will go live in our organization. It will be connected to Domino to allow us to deliver iPhone services to our corporate users. We have a number of iPhones requested from our user community and more are sure to come.

Since we plan to have an Exchange server, we’ve also discussed a group of existing Domino users that could be migrated to Exchange as their mail platform. These users only use email and Exchange is a great alternative for them. This also calls into question our commitment to Domino elsewhere. Some departments, like our HR group, are moving processes into applications that are not Domino-based, allowing us to delete Domino databases and prompting the question: why continue to use Notes as their email client? This becomes an even more interesting question when you factor in the UI similarities between Outlook and Notes 8.x - especially since Notes 8.x requires so much more system resource that we’ve decided to not move to it for the time being.

Having an Exchange server in the mix also opens up other possibilities, like further integration with our Cisco VoIP system, integration with some of our manufacturing equipment & systems and even prompted some discussion on evaluating SharePoint instead of Quickr (which we’re now doing).

All of this has been a very natural series of events for us, and I doubt its far from over. At the end of the day, Apple has done a great job of convincing the business world that the iPhone is a product everyone should carry with them - and the lack of integrating with our existing Domino environment (with the same ease and functionality as demoed with Exchange) means our IT team needs to look elsewhere for a solution.

Dark side, here we come.

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I was standing at the copy machine today (insert SNL line about “makin’ copies” here) when I noticed a new stamp on the table next to the copy machine. (Note the one on the left in the picture below).

I couldn’t help but be amused at this for some reason. The table is full of other stamps showing dates items were faxed, sent, received, etc. But now, someone felt it was important to have a stamp that reads: “emailed.” I’m not sure why the email “sent” file isn’t quite enough proof that an email was, you know, sent - but whatever.

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