The world as frankps sees it!
Posts tagged Nokia PC Suite
Testing Lotus Notes 8 and Nokia PC Suite
104 years ago
For quite a while I have been reading about the next version of Notes and Domino 8 (perhaps you better know it under the code name Hannover?), and big was my surprise when they last week got announced as public beta. I have been running Lotus Notes 8 for almost a week now on my Vista desktop computer at home, connected to the university network and our Domino server. As I have understood it, Lotus Notes 8 comes in two versions: One made in C++ and the second one made in JAVA. This means that the Lotus Notes 8 client can run on many supported operating systems, including Windows, MacOS X and Linux. Sadly the public beta didn’t include a Mac version as writing this. The Linux distrobution that IBM supports, is Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (what a horrible long name!).
Sadly, I am still running Notes 8 with version 7 templates and cannot make use of many of the new functionalities. But the new client looks far more thought through and the new poolished look makes it a pleasant surprise to use. One of the most exciting things that I haven’t been able to test out yet, is that Notes 8 offers a standards-based work environment and features support for ODF (Open Document Format). With IBM Productivity Editors, users can create, edit and save a variety of documents in ODF, including word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents. The Productivity Editors are said to allow users to import and export supported file formats used by Microsoft Office and Open Office file formats, edit those files, and save them in either the original format or as ODF documents. My question is what MS formats are supported? Is the support limited to Office 2003 or does it also support the new formats introduced with Office 2007?
As I am working a little bit from home, on a machine that I have already upgraded to Vista Enterprise, I didn’t manage to get Lotus Notes 7 working. With the public beta IBM only supports Windows XP, but I had no problems installing it on Vista. Configuring it afterwards went as a breeze. It was done in less then a minute, and then I was accessing our Domino servers.You might have already read that I recently bought my first Nokia phone in years, the E60. One of the reasons for doing so, was Nokia’s brilliant syncronization tool PC Suite. It works brilliantly with Vista, I haven’t ran in to any problems with it. It is the first syncronization tool to sync with Vista’s new Contacts solution (which reminds me very much of People in BeOS!), and it also works with Outlook and Lotus Notes 7.x. I am writing 7.x as I am only using Notes 8 with version 7 templates as mentioned earlier.
I was out drinking beer with some of my friends the other day, and we got in to discussions about various collaboration tools, and one started complaining about how bad Lotus Notes was as an email client. It turned out that it was one functionality he was missing, and that was capabilities for users to view incoming e-mail by “conversations,” with related messages appearing together to streamline communications. Well, it’s included in Notes 8!More important for me is the implementation of a simple RSS-reader. This not something big, but simply nice as I can now add corporate newsfeeds in to my Notes environment. It means that I can get news about the services that the central computer department is running next to my calendar and todo list. Making it far easier for me to priortise my work.
Nokia? You? Heh? What Happened?
04 years ago
These were more or less the words from my sister today, when she heard that I had bought a new phone yesterday. It was more or less as meeting yourself in the door. She remembered very well how much I disliked Nokia two, three years ago. But things have, as so often, changed.
Today I am a satisfied owner of a Nokia E60. Sony Ericsson is still making great phone, don’t me wrong, but they are not going for the features that are important for me. I admire Nokia for their E and N series. These phones are impressive. I have bought E70 and N70 phones for the management group at my department, and recommended them for a few of my colleagues (at other departments).
This blog entry is not to be a review of E60, the phone is already aging and about to leave the market! The fact that I bought it for 1 NOK, tells me that! There are mainly two reasons why I have developed an interest for Nokia’s business phones:
- Syncronization: Nokia delivers one of the best syncronzation technologies in market – period! It’s not discussible. Easy to set up and stable, both for Outlook and Lotus Notes 7.x. It also works well with Microsoft Vista, and even with Vista’s Contacts. Not even Microsoft’s own syncronization tool does that!
- E-mail: Support for Push Mail and a great implementation of IMAP, with support for both SSL/TLS. Works flawlessly with our IMAP server.
I find myself quite old fashioned when it comes to mobilephones. I still mostly use it for telephone calls, a few SMSes and now and then some data transfers. That’s more or less what I want from a mobilephone. People that know me, all know that I don’t care to much about SMS, MMS or camera technology on the phone. For taking digital photos you are still better of with a traditional camera. They are in quality 2-3 years ahead of the cameras included on phones. When it comes to video conferencing, the only time I established a video conference was with a friend to simply test the technology. I don’t know of anyone among my friends and colleagues that actually use this technology. But something I will give HTC and Sony Ericsson credits for, is that they have included MP3 players and memory card slots on their phones that works better then the Nokia ones. As I have to have a HTC smartphone for my work (my department is paying), I fast found myself using the included MP3 player instead of my Sandisk player.
One last thing, I love that Nokia has added wifi to some of their phones. It works brilliantly, and I am now a fringster! And I will try to set up my VoIP phone from Phonzo on the included SIP phone if possible.