Cingular Seminar on Blackberry Integration with Domino
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Yesterday, I attended an all day event sponsored by Cingular in Washington, DC, which presented the features and benefits of integrating Blackberry with Domino messaging. About 50 people attended, most of them were already Blackberry accounts, who were looking for the latest and greatest in forthcoming releases. Listed below are the summary comments from my notes:
• The session started with a quote from an IPSOS-Reid study which documented that the use of a Blackberry device added 52 minutes of productive time, each day. The phrase “25 hour day†was used, but I think most of us would understand it as the “25 hour workday.†(Blackberries are great, but some people just can't get off of them to get their productivity in motion.)
• RIM is releasing their new MDS, an IDE for creating applications. What is especially interesting, is that it relies on SOAP/WSDL web services to create the applications. This means, of course, that it will be much, much easier to create Domino/Blackberry applications when using Domino 7. It was very fast to create a Domino application (well, actually, all that is being created is an alternative front-end, or consumer, for the web services). Jennifer Ortiz did all the Blackberry/Domino heavy lifting, and gave a very clear overview of the product.
• The downside of RIM's MDS is that it requires a continuous connection to interact with the Domino server. Vaultus offers a more sophisticate Blackberry IDE which can create stand-alone applications that can perform connected or disconnected. I had a chance to meet with their Director of Business Development, Keith Waryas, and I was very impressed with their tools. Neat stuff.
• The new 4.0 Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) can install applications from the administrator without cradling or an e-mail attachment. Administrators can push and even know what each client has installed.
• David Patterson (dpatterson@rim.com) is the liaison for 3rd party Blackberry applications. If you are looking for a specific product (e.g., Salesforce.com integration), he's the person to ask.
• Two Lucent professionals gave a real-world scenario for their day-to-day interactivity with how they use Blackberry. If all you are thinking is phone and e-mail with Blackberry, their overview of using it with a CRM system is truly enlightening. One interesting side comment was that they found Treos more expensive than Blackberries.
Factoid: Dunkin Donuts Uses Blackberry and Domino
• Internoded had a presence, where they explained the benefits of hosting an offsite BES. Unlike with Exchange, BES actually runs on a Domino server and it's possible to have it exist off-site. Alexis Bristol (abristol@internoded.com) was very informative, and even suggested that Internoded supported SMB and SOHO remote installations (through a firewall or VPN) at a competitive rate of around $50/month/user.
• RIM does downplay that between every Blackberry device and a BES, RIM routes the packets through their NOC. This was an issue, last week, with an outage that stopped a large number of Blackberry devices from functioning in North America. None of their graphs or descriptions of Blackberry devices includes a reference to their NOC, and I think some people were surprised when their Blackberry's went silent. In all fairness, network devices will always be susceptible to equipment failures. The benefit of working through RIM is clear when you can see how their stuff “just works.†They are definitely beyond e-mail. Everyone else in the industry is trying hard to catch-up with RIM, but because they have built their architecture so well, and kept the pricing competitive, everyone else is going to be at a disadvantage.
• Conceivium Business Solutions were showing off remote systems administration for Linux, Unix, and Windows systems. They will be rolling out Domino remote administration interfaces for Blackberry devices in a few weeks. I think I'll try and get them to come to a DC Notes User Group meeting.
•
• Microsoft's announcement did not raise any alarms. When I spoke with several RIM and Microsoft partners, later, they explained that Blackberries do so much more than simple remote e-mail and do it so well, that's going to be a challenge to meet the RIM standard. I did hear that at least on big RIM customer, the Pentagon, is very interested in Microsoft's positioning.
• Tom Hinders, of IBM, presented a perspective of Workplace, Domino and Blackberry integration. Great stuff and full of good material.
• 40% of all IBM's intranet data is Domino based and an internal CIO based study concluded that there is no cost-effective way to migrate or convert it to any other system.
• Right now, IBM has about 30,000 users on Domino 7. It will be the most rigorously tested release of Domino—twice or triple that of ND6 and at least ten times improved over R5's initial release.
• Most of the Domino 7 upgrades will occur in 2006.
• Quarter-to-quarter growth in Lotus is still strong and growing.
• IBM uses Blackberries, and even provides hosting services.
• Sametime/Blackberry integration will probably happen by the end of the year. The beta program appears to be going strong, and the demo went well (after being able to connect up to the Internet). It was odd watching IM integration through Sametime, through Blackberries. I'm not exactly sure of it's real-world value, as I frequently use IM when I'm on the phone and in front of the computer. With a Blackberry, I'm using the phone on which I'm supposed to be IM-ing. I'd be interested in what others think of it. Pricing hasn't been set (whether or not it is an extra rate or not).
• The next upgrade to BES will support DB2 as an alternative to SQL Server.
Yesterday, I attended an all day event sponsored by Cingular in Washington, DC, which presented the features and benefits of integrating Blackberry with Domino messaging. About 50 people attended, most of them were already Blackberry accounts, who were looking for the latest and greatest in forthcoming releases. Listed below are the summary comments from my notes:
• The session started with a quote from an IPSOS-Reid study which documented that the use of a Blackberry device added 52 minutes of productive time, each day. The phrase “25 hour day†was used, but I think most of us would understand it as the “25 hour workday.†(Blackberries are great, but some people just can't get off of them to get their productivity in motion.)
• RIM is releasing their new MDS, an IDE for creating applications. What is especially interesting, is that it relies on SOAP/WSDL web services to create the applications. This means, of course, that it will be much, much easier to create Domino/Blackberry applications when using Domino 7. It was very fast to create a Domino application (well, actually, all that is being created is an alternative front-end, or consumer, for the web services). Jennifer Ortiz did all the Blackberry/Domino heavy lifting, and gave a very clear overview of the product.
• The downside of RIM's MDS is that it requires a continuous connection to interact with the Domino server. Vaultus offers a more sophisticate Blackberry IDE which can create stand-alone applications that can perform connected or disconnected. I had a chance to meet with their Director of Business Development, Keith Waryas, and I was very impressed with their tools. Neat stuff.
• The new 4.0 Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) can install applications from the administrator without cradling or an e-mail attachment. Administrators can push and even know what each client has installed.
• David Patterson (dpatterson@rim.com) is the liaison for 3rd party Blackberry applications. If you are looking for a specific product (e.g., Salesforce.com integration), he's the person to ask.
• Two Lucent professionals gave a real-world scenario for their day-to-day interactivity with how they use Blackberry. If all you are thinking is phone and e-mail with Blackberry, their overview of using it with a CRM system is truly enlightening. One interesting side comment was that they found Treos more expensive than Blackberries.
Factoid: Dunkin Donuts Uses Blackberry and Domino
• Internoded had a presence, where they explained the benefits of hosting an offsite BES. Unlike with Exchange, BES actually runs on a Domino server and it's possible to have it exist off-site. Alexis Bristol (abristol@internoded.com) was very informative, and even suggested that Internoded supported SMB and SOHO remote installations (through a firewall or VPN) at a competitive rate of around $50/month/user.
• RIM does downplay that between every Blackberry device and a BES, RIM routes the packets through their NOC. This was an issue, last week, with an outage that stopped a large number of Blackberry devices from functioning in North America. None of their graphs or descriptions of Blackberry devices includes a reference to their NOC, and I think some people were surprised when their Blackberry's went silent. In all fairness, network devices will always be susceptible to equipment failures. The benefit of working through RIM is clear when you can see how their stuff “just works.†They are definitely beyond e-mail. Everyone else in the industry is trying hard to catch-up with RIM, but because they have built their architecture so well, and kept the pricing competitive, everyone else is going to be at a disadvantage.
• Conceivium Business Solutions were showing off remote systems administration for Linux, Unix, and Windows systems. They will be rolling out Domino remote administration interfaces for Blackberry devices in a few weeks. I think I'll try and get them to come to a DC Notes User Group meeting.
•
• Microsoft's announcement did not raise any alarms. When I spoke with several RIM and Microsoft partners, later, they explained that Blackberries do so much more than simple remote e-mail and do it so well, that's going to be a challenge to meet the RIM standard. I did hear that at least on big RIM customer, the Pentagon, is very interested in Microsoft's positioning.
• Tom Hinders, of IBM, presented a perspective of Workplace, Domino and Blackberry integration. Great stuff and full of good material.
• 40% of all IBM's intranet data is Domino based and an internal CIO based study concluded that there is no cost-effective way to migrate or convert it to any other system.
• Right now, IBM has about 30,000 users on Domino 7. It will be the most rigorously tested release of Domino—twice or triple that of ND6 and at least ten times improved over R5's initial release.
• Most of the Domino 7 upgrades will occur in 2006.
• Quarter-to-quarter growth in Lotus is still strong and growing.
• IBM uses Blackberries, and even provides hosting services.
• Sametime/Blackberry integration will probably happen by the end of the year. The beta program appears to be going strong, and the demo went well (after being able to connect up to the Internet). It was odd watching IM integration through Sametime, through Blackberries. I'm not exactly sure of it's real-world value, as I frequently use IM when I'm on the phone and in front of the computer. With a Blackberry, I'm using the phone on which I'm supposed to be IM-ing. I'd be interested in what others think of it. Pricing hasn't been set (whether or not it is an extra rate or not).
• The next upgrade to BES will support DB2 as an alternative to SQL Server.
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Comments
Jack
Posted by Jack Dausman At 12:55:20 AM On 07/01/2005 | - Website - |
Posted by Tony Kelleran At 09:42:35 PM On 06/30/2005 | - Website - |