Lotus Traveler on the Droid – There’s an App For That

This morning my new Droid finally showed up at my door, I have been anxiously waiting to try this device out.  The first order of business was to work on connecting it up to Lotus Notes for my mail, calendar and contacts.

So to start with a disclaimer – Droid (or any Android based phones) are NOT supported in the latest release of Lotus Traveler.  I am working against a server running Domino & Traveler 8.5.1. The first think I decided to try was iNotes Ultralite (also not officially supported), so the first step was to configure my iNotes redirect to recognize the Droid browser as a mobile browser that should default to Ultralite mode.  I fired up the browser on the Droid and hit the site  What’s My User Agent?
A picture named M2

Which told me “Android 2.0” was the User Agent String I needed enter in the iNotes redirect config, here is what mine looks like now A picture named M3 Once I saved this, when I hit the redirector database and logged in I was redirected to iNotes Ultralite A picture named M4               A picture named M5

OK I know what you really want to hear about is Traveler so here we go! I started by trying to configure the native Droid e-mail app via ActiveSync, and while it seemed like it was connecting nothing was happening a quick google search let me to this post titled Getting Droid connected to Domino with Traveler which seemed to match exactly what I had run in to.  This post also contained a link out to another post titled Getting Lotus Traveler to Work With My Droid.

So off I was to find the Touchdown application and install it on my Droid, and as promised down came my e-mail, contacts, and calendar entries. When installing Traveler manually your server name should be servername.domainname/servlet/traveler, and the Windows Domain Field is left blank Despite the warnings in the original post about HTML mail I am having pretty good luck they don’t all render perfectly but most of them are readable.  The other limitation is taking action on new calendar events, just like on the iPhone you can not currenrly Accept/Decline or otherwise act on new meeting requests, however entires already on your calendar display and notify just fine (included federated calendar events).

The one real draw back seems to be lack of support for attachments. Here is what my entry looks like on the server in the Traveler database A picture named M6 The Touchdown application is currently on a 5 day trial, and it is $9.99 to purchase which if it continues ot work I probably will do at the end of the trial.

A picture named M7  A picture named M8

Now it certainly would be nice to be able to use the “native” mail and calendar application on the Droid, but as Ed Brill explained in a recent blog post on Android, one of the challenges the platform presents is that unlike the other mobile platforms that Traveler supports Android is open, and there is actually no definitive “native” application

The philosophy with Lotus Notes Traveler has been to leverage built-in capabilities on the devices that are supported.  In some cases, we install a small shim program to handle communications to Domino, but we don’t build mail/calendar/contacts applications.

More to the point, since Android is an open platform, we will see different device manufacturers elect to include or exclude different components from their implementations, or choose to build their own, or implement third-party, solutions for different functionality.

So with all that said and done, lets take a look at where we wind up: First using an application available in Android Market, you can use a Droid with Traveler now, and basically achieve the same functionality that is available on the iPhone today.  What we can learn from this, is that IBM obviously stayed very true to the ActiveSync protocol when the implemented support for iPhone which is why other devices (albeit not supported) have been able to work with Traveler Second while nothing official has been announced clearly IBM is looking at support for Droid who knows maybe even in 8.5.2 I will be working with the Android going forward, and will certainly report back any new findings on Android and Traveler.

2 Responses to Lotus Traveler on the Droid – There’s an App For That
  1. Warren Elsmore
    December 3, 2009 | 9:34 am

    Mitch,

    Did you try entering a dummy username in your Domino Directory account, like MYDOMAIN\mcohen? I wonder if that would trick it into working with no extra software?

  2. Luis Guirigay
    December 3, 2009 | 10:29 am

    { Link }

    There is also another product you can use which I think the interface is a little bit better. Working on that post right now.