Syncing Lotus Notes Calendar with the iPhone

So, Yahoo's mail upgrade with pop3 access turned out to be a decent solution to my email struggles on my iPhone. I'm still waiting for a production solution to push email from Notes to my iPhone.
We'll have to see what Visto comes up with.

So, I tried a lot of possible solutions for syncing my Notes calendar to the calendar on the iPhone.

I tried syncing with Google Calendar, pulling that down to iCal on my MAC and then syncing with the iPhone. This turned out to be problematic on a number of fronts. Syncing Google Calendar with iCal eliminated all of the alarms. That was a show stopper for me with my typical schedule.

I had also tried using Outlook and the Lotus Notes Plug-in for Outlook. Then syncing the iPhone with Outlook. Then I thought I'd be able to sync the calendar from the iPhone with iCal on my MAC. This may have worked, if it hadn't really screwed up my Lotus Notes calendar. Essentially, I had to delete and recreate every repeating appointment in my calendar. Drove my staff crazy I think.

There were a couple other attempts with Companion Link, GSync, etc. None worked well. Each had their own minor issues.

What I ended up doing was using a little bit of brute force. The solution I used for email actually turned out to be the solution that worked best for me for iCal, too.

It turned out that meetings, appointments, and rescheduled events are forwarded properly to Yahoo mail as ics attachments. On my MAC I can either download these from the Yahoo mail web interface when I'm behind the firewall at work. (It doesn't allow POP3 access to external mail servers.) When I'm not locked down behind a firewall, I can open these attachments from mail on the MAC.

Either way, they show up in iCAL as invitations / notifications and are easily added to iCal. The only catch is if I am BCC on the notice. These have to be manually entered.

Another glitch is that meetings that I schedule, I have to re-enter on the MAC.

But all in all, this seems to be working well for me. The alarms stay on when syncing to the iPhone. My Lotus Notes calendar doesn't get screwed up every other day. And I can have all of my iCal calendars on my iPhone.

Still banking on Visto for a full featured solution, but latest news that I saw was for an email only solution.

8/17/2007 - Update - Well, I have had to edit several of the .ics files that get forward to Yahoo in order to get them applied to iCal. Textedit works just fine. Some of the frequent issues follow.
- If I am bcc'd on an invite, I end up replacing the organizers or chairs email address with one of mine, such as the Yahoo address. It's fairly obvious in the .ics where this exists.
- For meetings where I am the chair, I've started putting my Yahoo address as an optional attendee. In some cases, I stil need to edit the .ics file to remove the Lotus format email, CN="First Last\context\domain" with CN="". I believe, iCal looks at that first against you card in Contacts. Next step will be to see if I can add that into contacts.
- The other issue I've found is room reservation show up as attendees but don't get sync'd to the iphone. In those cases, while I have the .ics file open. I add a location line.

Far from perfect, but so far it's not terribly painful.