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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