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IBM to Bring Lotus Notes to iPhone, iPod touch, and Mac

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 10:05 AM - by

At its Lotusphere conference next week, IBM will announce the release of its Lotus Notes email software for the iPhone and iPod touch, according to an Associated Press article. The company will also issue it, along with the free Lotus Symphony suite, for Mac OS X. Lotus Symphony includes documents, spreadsheets, and other functionality similar to Microsoft Office.

IBM spokesman Mike Azzi told the AP that his company and Apple "have a lot in common. We're going to cross-pollinate."

Lotus Notes requires use of IBM's Domino email server, and it will be free to those who have a Lotus Web access license. New users will need to pay fees that start at US$39 annually.

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vasic said:

member since 09 Aug 2005 with 278 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Jan 16, 2008 11:59 am

Delivering Lotus Notes client for iPhone could easily displace BlackBerry from the most popular mobile e-mail device. If this client were to become a fully-featured version, capable of running all Notes applications, it could spread like wildfire. There are over 130 million Lotus Notes users out there (practically all corporate). Those that have a mobile e-mail solution were forced to choose BlackBerry solution. Now, if Notes becomes available on the iPhone, I can't see any reason why a company that uses Notes as their corporate groupware tool couldn't switch. And of course, it would begin from the top - the CEO, or CIO, or CxO of some kind, wanting to get his iPhone to work with their mail.

This will become one of the significant driving forces for 2008.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Jan 16, 2008 1:00 pm

This is underwhelming. IBM is retooling their web-mail client to render in an iPhone browser.

I would assume that this isn't a native Iphone app, supporting push-email or working nicely over the standard phone network.

We're going to need (our regularly lousy) Edge connection and a half an hour to kill goofing around through yet-another-shoddy-IBM-UI.

I think your enthusiasm may well be misplaced, vasic. Which sucks, because I like the vision.

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Dirt Road said:

member since 24 Oct 2002 with 1239 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Jan 16, 2008 1:16 pm

Notes sucks in general, but I have to agree with Vasic. In a Notes environment, like the one I have to work in, the only viable mobile solution is a Crackberry right now. I've said to myself that iPhones wouldn't get too far in those places unless there's a Notes client — now that one's on the way, iPhones could really take off in the corporate sphere.

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vasic said:

member since 09 Aug 2005 with 278 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:55 pm

I must say, our guest here has dampened my enthusiasm about this somewhat. Re-reading carefully the news bit, I'm not sure if the software will be the 're-tooled web-mail client' or a full, native Notes client. Article says that IBM and Apple had been working together on this for some time already, which may or may not mean that this is actually native. I'm not sure how much Apple's help IBM would have needed in order to develop and test a web client that works on iPhone Safari; most other developers (including SAP) didn't. We'll need to wait for Lotusphere.

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kirk said:

member since 18 Jan 2008 with 1 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:52 am

Have to say it wouldn't surprise me if this was some sort of native app. developed with the help of Apple. Seems that Steve has always had a bit of a soft spot for Lotus.... maybe because they were one of the original and most loyal users of NeXT products (I seem to remember them even developing a spreadsheet specifically for the NeXTcube)... whatever the reason it would really surprise me if Lotus was making this big a deal out of a simple reworked iPhone-specific web mail interface.

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