Please have a look at my article Notes Traveler on the iPhone.

I’ve always been in favor of group calendar solutions, and therefor often written about Notes products. Recently the annual Lotussphere took place, and a lot of new stuff got announced. LinkedIn and IBM announced a partnership, in the future we will be able to use a LinkedIn add-on very similar to Xobni in Lotus Notes. Another partnership was with Skype. And Lotus Live is on the way. Yepp, this is the year of cloud computing. I can’t wait.

At the same time as Lotussphere I started upgrading my department’s computers with the latest Lotus Notes, version 8.5. I chose to install the standard version of the client and not the basic one. And ta-ta, users were quite impressed with the upgrade. I also bought a license of Notes Pro for my iPhone, and this is what the article is all about. This is my review. Notes Pro is an alternative for iNotes Ultralite.

Notes Pro costed me about 85 NOK on iTunes Music Store. From the application’s web page you can read that Notes Pro is an all-in-one Lotus Notes solution for the iPhone, that lets you access your Notes mail, calendar, group contacts and todos directly from Notes Pro. Before you can run Notes Pro on your iPhone, some basic Lotus Notes account configuration is required. So before purchasing the application, please read the Lotus Notes Server Setup Instructions and ensure your Lotus Notes server is compatible with Notes Pro.

You need to be able to to drop a simple script into your Agents folder in the Lotus Notes Application. Four versions of the script are available, among the things the script sets is where to look for your contacts. I tried both versions of the International version, Global and Local. I guess Local would only give you the Contacts you have in your local address book, but I did not get Local working. Global on the other hand was working, but I must say poorly with a global address book including all our 3.000 users. But as you can see from my screenshots, I also ran in to other problems. The appointments that appeared on Notes Pro, were the ones first taking place in December this year (screenshots were taken in the end of January!).

So with a not really working global address book and calendar, I was left with Mail and ToDo. I was able to send new mails access my list of todos, but not add new todos. The graphical user interface on the application is rather poor and not what we expect from an iPhone application, and with the limited of functionality included you are better of using the free Lotus iNotes Ultralite.

But …, I saved the very best news from Lotussphere to the very end. Notes Pro for the iPhone will in the future not be needed, as IBM plans to add support for ActiveSync (please have a look at my Google Sync article). What will this mean for us endusers? We will use the synchronization application EasySync less and sync wirelessly on-the-fly. The ActiveSync protocol is becoming a de facto standard for wireless synchronization. Another thing is that in the future we will not need iNotes Ultralite and Notes Pro.

I will test future versions of Notes Pro. Hopefully my problems will be solved.