Tag: lotus_traveler

Lotus Traveler saves real money!


This morning at IBM Software Dag I have been talking to a number of customers already. One exciting story to start of the day was a company who have completed the switch from an existing, for-pay, mobile mail provider to fully embrace Lotus Traveler 8.5.2. They now only provide mobile mail using Apple iPhones and the Lotus Traveler they are entitled to as part of licensing Lotus Notes.

Now the choice of mobile mail provider isn’t really all that exciting so why blog about it? The reason is that the switch has saved them 60.000 USD in licensing! And that’s only the savings on the mobile mail software. No costs from decommissioning servers, savings from supports and/or maintenance is included in the above number. And this is a relatively small company (around 500 employees).

So why haven’t they switched to Lotus Traveler before? Well they have been waiting for Lotus Traveler 8.5.2 to utilize the support for HTTP/HTTPS as they rely on reverse proxy servers to channel the traffic through the various layers of firewall. They use Apache HTTP server and mod_proxy to channel the traffic through. Again free and open.

Great story to start the day.

Why iPhone OS 4 is interesting for Lotus Traveler customers

Today on my commute I was reading about the iPhone upcoming iPhone OS 4 (Multitasking tops tentpole features in iPhone 4.0). Much, and probably way too much, have already been written about the iPhone and iPad lately but one feature of iPhone OS 4 is important to Lotus Traveler customers.

As you might know the iPhone uses the ActiveSync protocol for communication with the Lotus Traveler server. On the iPhone this is called an “Exchange account” of which you could only have a one. For many this is not an issue but it’s really a frustrating and silly restriction (among other things it made it difficult for those of us with multiple e-mail accounts). Reading the run down I was very happy to read that this restriction will be lifted and you now may have more than one ActiveSync account. <insert waves of joy here>

As to the other features being added I guess one can only say that competition is healthy and is advantageous to the customer.