spiff72

Hey all,

I was notified last week Friday that they finally released the version that supports the Droid, and I just installed the trial version this morning.

The initial setup was a little confusing I followed the instructions for the Droid Eris, which is posted on their software download page (but I had to make a few tweaks)...

Go to "Settings", "Accounts and Sync", press the "Add Account" button, choose "Corporate", entered my Lotus Notes external (internet style) email address and password, and then things get tricky...

The next screen shows fields for several settings, which I set up as follows:

Domain\Username - You have to enter the "alias" as described in the Droid Eris document, followed by backslash and the username of my Lotus Notes account (which is also described in the Eris setup document). So mine looked like "alias@email.com\Jeff" (without quotes). The alias can be a different email address than your notes email - it depends on how you set up the software and your account with commontime.

Password - your notes password

Exchange Server - eas.commontime.com

I unchecked the use secure connection item (not sure if it works if you leave this checked). I did this because it looked like they had it unchecked in the Eris document. I might try doing this with secure connections and see if it works.

I think the next screen checks the server connection. Mine was successful and it said mail was on the way. You also can set up whether you want push email or pull (with a time interval to check for mail).

There was only an option for syncing contacts here, which I checked. I was concerned here, since I wanted calendar sync too, but I will get back to this in a minute.

Once I did the above, my mail started coming, in the "Email" app (not Gmail).

I also was confused about the contact sync and whether it worked. It appears that they are maintained separately from your google contacts, and you have options in the contacts app to show or not show contacts from each source account that is set up on the phone. Mine is set to show both, but it appears to merge the contacts from what I can see. In other words, you can pick a contact and if it is both a google contact and a local address book contact from Notes, you will see the google contact info first, and the corporate contact info below. I still need to try and see what happens if you don't show the google account contacts.

Finally, the calendar. After setting up the exchange account, I started the corporate calendar app, and as I watched, my calendar started populating (I was in month view). As far as I can tell, it synced all my meetings/appointments/all day events (including repeating meetings). Time will tell whether it deals with some of the Lotus notes custom recurring meeting options. (The first test will be when someone cancels a single occurrence of a repeating meeting). I suspect that it will work, since I think Google calendar's inability to handle some of these odd recurring meetings was the issue. The corporate calendar doesn't appear to show up in google calendar.

After I went back to this new exchange account in "Accounts and Sync", there was a check box to turn on and off the calendar sync. I guess this doesn't happen until you actually run the Corporate Calendar app.

So far I am pleased with the way it works. But I intend to take the full 30 days to evaluate the software and see if I am willing to pay for this new functionality on my phone. I am also interested to see if I can accept meeting invites from my phone. I haven't been able to do that in the past, but the Exchange functionality might make this possible.

I will post updates as I find new info or issues.