I just sat through Ed Brill’s session on the future direction of Notes. I’ve kept up with his blog and shared a few spirited (in a positive way) emails with him over the year – but it dawned on my today that I had never seen him speak at Lotusphere. I set out to change that and I’m glad I did. He did an excellent job presenting and is one of those rare speakers you enjoy listening to for a long period of time.
The session was really what I thought was missing out of the OGS. They covered details about where Notes/Domino is going; highlighted features in 8.5; talked about some specifics in the next release; etc. They also talked about IBM/Lotus’ overall vision and philosophy – which really helps explain a lot of what they’ve been doing lately. He talked about how they are working to sort of “pop up” in unusual places, like Macworld. Its a good plan because it gets Lotus in front of end-users with their message (which has been something I’ve said would be a great idea for years now). IBM/Lotus is very happy with their results so far (Ed cited a few articles from a variety of sources that covered product announcements in the last several months). That’s all really positive stuff and frame their mindset as they go to market.
But by far THE MOST EXCITING thing they SHOWED was an iPhone using ActiveSync to connect with a Domino server. The demo was almost lackluster because it worked so well. They opened mail, calendar and contacts – all of which were connected to a Domino source using ActiveSync. VERY impressive!
They said that they weren’t in a position to make an announcement, which means no ETA has been established. Still, it was increadibly exciting to see that its being worked on (and appears to look VERY close to usable!)
Tags: iphone
January 19th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
[...] lifted 5 minutes of content about the direction of Notes/Domino from the INV102 session). I suggest reading that entry first, and then coming back to this one with the understanding that I’ve eased up a bit on my [...]
January 19th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
ActiveSync as in Microsoft’s sync protocol? No dates? At least it is movement forward, cant wait to get that functionality, thanks for the update
January 19th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Yeah – ActiveSync! They were careful to say “they are not in a position to announce anything” yet did a demo live off an iPhone and said that ActiveSync was the thing that made it possible.