Lotus Notes to iPhone sync update

Well it's a new year. I feel I've gotten syncing to the iPhone from Lotus Notes running fairly smoothly, comparatively speaking.

For email, I've switched to VistoMobile for the iPhone. Actually, I had tried this when it was first released. It had worked pretty well for a while, but then I began to notice connectivity issues and some inconsistencies with the emails being synced to the iPhone. I've recently given it another try and once again it seems to be working fairly well. This utilizes a Windows Desktop client component which syncs email between your inbox and the iPhone.

VistoMobile also provides access to the corporate directory for looking up contacts. Comes in handy for sending an email to 1 contact, but is not integrated enough to send an email to a group of contacts at this point.

For syncing calendars, I use a combination of iCal, Live Mail, and the Httpmail plugin for Mail now that it is available for Leopard. Within Lotus Notes, I forward meeting requests to my Live Mail account. Using the httpmail plug-in I am able to update my iCal calendar with these events. For meetings that I am scheduling I include my live mail account as an attendee.

I went with Live Mail and the httpmail plugin because I can access this mail from behind the corporate fire wall. This allows me to keep my iCal calendar and iPhone sync'd during the day.

If there are events I book on my iPhone directly, I email the event to my corporate email account. Then I import the event from within Lotus Notes.

Certainly, this is not an ideal situation. I have, however, gotten the amount of rework and reentry down considerably from previous configurations.