If anyone was wondering if IBM was in the mobile game to stay, Big Blue’s slew of announcements at Lotusphere 2010 this week showed a continued commitment to expanding the mobile footprint of Lotus applications into the enterprise. The company unveiled new applications and support for BlackBerry, iPhone and Android.
IBM’s annual collaboration conference has Big Blue and Research In Motion snuggling closer than ever before. Both longtime partners and mobile enterprise fixtures, the two companies released new applications and demonstrated a renewed and strengthened relationship with IBM announcing it will resell RIM devices into its enterprise customer base, a first for the company.
Here are the new BlackBerry applications set to be released beginning in the second quarter of 2010, and continuing through the rest of the year: document sharing application Lotus Quickr, social networking application Lotus Connections and mobile access to Lotus Symphony documents with planned support for presentations and spreadsheets. IBM already supports Domino, Notes and Lotus Sametime instant messaging on BlackBerry.
IBM and RIM also announced BlackBerry support is now available in the Lotus Domino Designer and XPages development environments so Lotus developers can now “write once” for both Web and BlackBerry smartphones.
Big Blue isn’t putting all of its eggs in RIM’s basket when it comes to enterprise mobility and collaboration, though. IBM knows both Apple and Google are eyeing the enterprise, and even though many IT administrators have refused to let those pesky Apple devices in the door, the iPhone is slowly and surely making progress.
Back in October, IBM announced native support for Lotus Domino on the iPhone for email, calendaring and contacts that also provided mobile security and management capabilities for added security and remote wiping capabilities if the device was lost or stolen.
This week, IBM went further by debuting Lotus Notes Traveler Companion, a free plug in available through the iPhone app store that allows users to see a Domino email as a link on the iPhone and the iPod Touch. By entering their Traveler password, users can respond, and once the email is closed, IBM says all encrypted email data is wiped from the device. The new Traveler Companion application does require a fix pack to the Traveler 8.5.1 server, however.
Not to leave Google out, IBM unveiled a demo of its Android version of Traveler, which it says will be available this year.
“We're doing the engineering to do this right -- and ahead of Microsoft, by the way,” said Ed Brill, Lotus’s director of product management.
IBM also announced plans to include support for the Notes Traveler server software on Linux in 2010.
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