Native iPhone support for Notes and more

This evening, the blogger group got a little embargo-free news that will be hitting all of the major news sites via the official press releases tomorrow. They gave us a sneak peak at some of the announcements coming down the pipe, and a big one is native iPhone support for Notes.

What I mean by that is that Lotus Traveler will support Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol and it will allow Notes to talk natively to the iPhone mail, calendar and contacts application. So before the end of 2009, we should see the release of this technology and then push email and synchronization will be available for Notes just like Exchange and Mobile.me. Lotus will still continue to develop enhancements to Ultralite so customers will have a choice of going browser-based or native apps. Very cool news indeed.

Not much news on Sametime 8.5 that we didn’t already know and I hadn’t already written about in Intranet Journal. The only thing is that the coolest new features are only available on a WebSphere based system. So if you have Domino Sametime, you’ll still get an 8.5 version, but it won’t have all the cool whiz-bang features of the WebSphere one. Kinda disappointed in that actually.

Next, Foundations will be shipping version 1.1 with the ability to do Branch Offices. So that means if you have an enterprise-wide Domino system and you open a branch office of 5 people in Utah, you can drop ship a Foundations box that will allow you to connect directly to your existing Domino infrastructure. Pretty cool stuff. They are also supporting a built-in version of the VMWare hypervisor. This means you can install additional OS’s and applications on TOP of the exisiting Foundations stack. Some really powerful stuff.

We then got to see demos of Xerox doing some proof of concept stuff with their copiers and Foundations. They had a copier talking to a Foundations server, and they scanned in a spreadsheet from paper, and it connected to the Domino user, and brought that spreadsheet up in Symphony in their Notes client. So copier, talking to Foundations, who then passed it on to the Notes client itself. It was really cool. Impressive stuff that I hope sees the light of day sooner rather than later.

Once again, it’s been very cool to see things like this at Lotusphere this year. We bloggers are being treated very well, and it’s been nice. Thanks to Lotus and Erica Topolski in particular. She rocks…