Notes on Productivity Home Page

Some of my productivity-minded friends are attempting to use an iPhone to get things done with Lotus Notes. My friend, Kelly Forrister, of the David Allen Company, has been blogging about implementing GTD on her iPhone and I have enjoyed learning from her experiences. Unfortunately, many of the solutions we've tried to connect the iPhone to Notes so far haven't worked out very well for us and it's been a rough road to integration.

At Lotusphere 2009, IBM announced that they would integrate ActiveSync into the IBM Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5 platform offering so that iPhone (and presumably Windows Mobile,too) users could natively sync their iPhone with their Lotus Notes Mail., Calendar, and Contacts. Fellow Notes blogger, Gregg Edlred points to the news surrounding the announcement of the forthcoming iPhone OS 3.0 release with respect to support for synchronization with Lotus Notes. So far, things appear to consistently suggest that we can expect to see this functionality mid-year.

This is encouraging news.

I've explored the idea of writing or partnering with someone to write an iPhone-specific version of eProductivity for IBM Lotus Notes but to really make things happen, we'd like to see a few things in terms of developer support.

Here are some of the things that I'm still looking for, hoping for, waiting for:

1. Full Sync of Tasks to a suitable onboard task manager (Notably missing in the ActiveSync announcements or any press that I have seen is any mention of Tasks, but that's another post for another day.)
2. Better support for on device application management with sync to external databases wired/wirelessly so we can write our own task app (see #1)
3. Multitasking - so that we can run multiple apps/threads concurrently and have stuff happen in the background
4. At least minimal security/remote admin - important for enterprise users.

What are you most waiting for in terms of integration between the iPhone and Lotus Notes?