CommonTime mNotes Wireless brings Lotus Notes sync to webOS 16
by Derek Kessler
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:58 pm EST
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:58 pm EST 
Howard Stern, take note: Lotus Notes synchronization has come to the Palm Pre, courtesy of CommonTime’s newly updated mNotes Wireless. The update to mNotes brings over-the-air Lotus Notes sync to webOS, as well as the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and S60. Lotus Notes support the Pre through mNotes is handled through Microsoft Exchange syncing; essentially mNotes is transforms Lotus Notes into an Exchange account.
The latest version of mNotes and the mSuite for Palm Pre is available as a free trial from the CommonTime website, extended use comes to the tune of $140/year.
Thanks to muchtall for the tip!
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16 Comments
140 a year? Thats insane
I was waiting for something like this... but at $140/yr I'm going to wait a lot longer that's for sure.
The good news is the price of CommonTime mNotes Wireless is set to come down significantly. Certainly if you took a free trial, by the time it was up the price should be lower. Will post again as soon as I know exactly when the price change is going to take place! Hope this is good news for some :-)
UPDATE: Price now reduced - $69.95 /
CompanionLink for Google will two-way sync address, calendar, and to-do from Notes to Google (and therefore the Pre). I've been using it for Calendar only, and its working great. $39.99, one-time charge, and oh-so-very worth it. I use it to keep my all of my work calendar info on one google calendar, so I finally have my private and work lives synched (and yet separate) on my phone. Check it out - http://www.companionlink.com/products/companionlinkforgoogle.html
(And no, I'm not a paid shill, just a very happy customer.)
Hmm.. nice! Initially I was looking at the Notes CL USB sync solution rather than going through gCal, but maybe I should just bite the bullet and just use (and sync) different calendars via gCal. Thanks.
I'm so glad I no longer work at a place that uses Lotus Notes.
All this reliance on intermediary products. Palm needs a solid local sync product like Palm Desktop and needs to include it with its products. Cloud sync is nice but I never want to have to rely on a third party to protect my data.
you have to get over Palm creating a local sync option. It is not going to happen. They clearly stated that they will not be doing such a thing. Deal with it or use the 3rd party apps.
Sorry for sounding harsh. But you guys just don't get it.
@ RenardRouge. There is nothing stopping you from using cloud syncing from the phone then using a 3rd party app to pull in down to your PC.
Wait, Derek is a Howard Stern fan as well? that's shocking.
I used a prior version of mNote to sync my Treo 755p to Notes and wasn't a fan. I wanted a simple sync solution, and it seemed to want to do a lot more than I wanted. There were maybe 5 distinct sync modes hidden away in menus, etc. Complex to use.
Also seemed to be a bit...brittle. It'd work great for a while, then something would go wrong on Notes or my Treo or mNotes and the next time I synced mNotes would duplicate all the events on my Treo. The duplicates would then sync back to Notes as new events. And the events that were meetings (i.e. had attendees) - every attendee would get a meeting notice for these "new" meetings with me as the chair person, even if I was just another attendee on the original. Then my phone would start ringing like crazy with 50 people asking me why I was scheduling a new department meeting at the same time as the one they already had on their calendar.
About the 3rd time that happened, I deleted mNotes for good. Don't know if the program was buggy, if I had it set up wrong or what, but I wasn't going through another round of outraged phone calls.
laughable price
You can also use Notes Traveler in 8.5.1 to sync to your Pre. Having to put in your 4 digit PIN every time you want to use your phone stinks.
http://www.lotususergroup.org/Blogsphe.nsf/d6plinks/SPOB-7WTRH9
I appreciate that 3rd party companies are trying to close a huge hole in Palm's email sync strategy, but $140 a year is ridiculous to bring sync to the second most popular email platform for large corporations. If Palm wants to be taken seriously as a business device, they need to get with IBM and work out a perfect sync solution for Notes and webOS.
They should have seen this coming after the Howard Stern incident. He works for a company that uses Notes. He has no ability to switch to Exchange. Many who use Lotus Notes cannot forward their email to a Gmail account due to security in place. I get it that Exchange is the most popular, but Notes is #2. You can't afford to ignore that market. I hate using Notes, and we haven't even finished the switch to Notes 8 yet. Blackberry is the only solution that syncs properly and reliably. RIM will continue to rule corporate customers until another smartphone achieves the same level of email, PIM, document editing, security, and battery life. That's what big business cares about. Not how many apps are in the app store, or how good the games are. Those things are just icing on the cake for the guy who has to use it. The Blackberry OS may be old and janky, but people will still use it until another OS does it's core business functions better.
Where I work we use notes and they won't let you sync via the web for security reasons (can't blame them I guess) so my only solution is CompanionLink USB. It's been working well for me for a few weeks now. The cost was reasonable, 140 for CT just seems way to pricey.
$140/year works out to be just under $12/month. I don't think that's THAT bad. In any event, I use Lotus enough that I'm willing to pay the price if it works well. So I downloaded the trial and tried to set it up, but I can't get it to work. I've contacted tech support for help, but they only provide support through email and take a VERY long time to respond. Has anybody else had any luck getting mNotes to work with the Pre? If so, please send me an email at andrewchristie1@gmail.com.
Thanks!
The price for CommonTime mNotes Wireless just come down from today. Now looking at $69.95 /