Leadership By Numbers

Category Administration IBM/Lotus Domino ND8


All-around-smart-guy Steven Vaughan-Nichols  (and his blog) has me reconsidering what a mobile e-mail client is supposed to be, and it's not the world of Blackberries and Treos. His write up on The Age of Ubiquity in SDTimes.com (in print media, not yet on the web) is a comprehensive preview of what's to come: always-on, light-weight web applications built for mobile devices.

Pick your future. On one hand I have push-mail like a Blackberry and on the other I have the iPhone UltraLite interface for Lotus Notes. A few months ago, I was all blustery and frustrated that IBM couldn't provide a full e-mail client on the Apple iPhone. After working with the UltraLite interface of iNotes with Apples' iPhone and several different Windows Mobile phones (and, of course, the Wii)--I'm being swayed away from insisting on a full client as the best fit.

It's important to choose carefully, because the IT martinets no longer control the enterprise mobile client. The iPhone phenomenon pretty much demolished any corporate controls on supported devices. Several weeks ago, I had a call begging me to fix an IMAP issue on how the iPhone connects to one of our SSL proxy servers. "Mm, we don't support the iPhone/IMAP right now . . . don't you have a Blackberry ? " I asked. I was told that the Blackberry phone was at home while the caller was 1,500 miles away (on the campaign trail) and needed immediate e-mail access.

In the SDTimes article, Vaughan-Nichols surveys the industry for mobile connectedness, and quotes an InStat wireless research group that concludes that the killer mobile application has been wireless e-mail. The debate is whether or not the e-mail has to be a resident program: (e.g., Treos, Blackberries) or a web app (e.g., the iNotes UltraLite). It's the maturation of Apple's WebKit that looks to make a difference:

WebKit also enjoys broad corporate and developer support. For example, Webkit is already supported in Google's Linux-based Android, Mac OS X, Symbian OS, Trolltech's Qt and, on higher levels, the GNOME (GNU Object Model Environment) Linux desktop environment and the Opera browser. Any application written toward a WebKit browser with XHTML should render almost as easily on a mobile device as it does on a PC. (emphasis mine)

If my mobile device is a phone that is always connected, then a well-designed browser based e-mail package is probably more than good enough. It certainly streams down the infrastructure costs: no more dedicated servers for a single family of devices (e.g., CommonTime, RIM, etc.), the employee can choose what ever toy phone is most appropriate, they will normally pay for their own data plan, and our security officer likes the idea that no documents are stored on the device.

Google Android is out and running loose. There is no corporate e-mail client for Microsoft Exchange on Android--but I already know that UltraLite works fine with it. And, we can expect that the upcoming Nokias that support Symbian OS will also work well. Looks like the UltraLite is better positioned for the increasing predominance of mobile devices, than would be a dedicated e-mail client.

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