Today, a colleague made me aware that our company’s Lotus Notes install now allows us to access email, calendars and contacts on our iPhones, natively, using an Exchange ActiveSync connection.
However, the iPhone only supports one such ActiveSync connection at a time. Basically, I can have a nice connection with my company data, or with my private data, but not both.
the connection with Notes is nothing short of what you’d expect. Nothing out of the ordinary, mail, calendar and contacts just work as the iPhone usually does, which is exceptional for Lotus Notes. And it’s awesome, I’ve never felt so nicely in control of my Notes data (the Notes desktop client and the various webmails are notoriously clunky).
But I’d gotten used to having my iPhone contact and calendar data sync with Gmail seamlessly, and be comfortably and reliably available on the iPhone.
I still used IMAP for mail because of the lack of comfortable identity control, but even that was reasonably easy to set up, and seamless to use. It only came at the cost of push mail, which is more intense than I can deal with anyway.
But now, I’ve got to choose between mommy (private email on Gmail) and daddy (professional email on Notes), what a bummer!
I might switch my private email to Yahoo, which syncs separately from the ActiveSync account…
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