About two years ago I came across and rolled out IBM Mobile Connect for a company. This product was the simplist and best product I had ever come across for allowing Pocket PC and Palm device users access to their Lotus Notes email via a wireless or GPRS connection. It was simple to setup and very secure.

About 6 months ago I was looking into rolling out this product here where I work now but when I conected my business partner I was told that the product was no longer available and that there were no other products from IBM that was a direct replacement. The closest was WebSphere Everyplace Access but it didn’t do exactly what I wanted and the costs were that little bit too high.

Well the PDA project was knocked on the head for a while until last month when one of the senior exec’s decided that he wanted to access his mail on his PDA. I started looking around at all the products that were out there ( The Domino Unpluged Links Page is a great starting place ), rang a few vendors and talked to a few technical guys. There were a number of points that needed to be covered before I’d even look seriously at a product, Security, Easy of Use and Notifications.

I ended up talking to ExtendedSystems today, the guys that write EasySync for Lotus. Their server based product looked the closest to the original IBM Mobile Connect that I had wanted and then when talking to the techy guy he mentions the port number that their product uses, 5001. That’s the exact same port number that IBM Mobile Connect used. I just had to ask if the two product were related in any way and I was right, The ExtendedSystems product two years ago was rebranded and sold as IBM Mobile Connect.

Obviously in two years there have been a lot of new features to this product, some which make it stand out as the number one choise for our infrastructure. The nicest feature is the DMZ Proxy module whcih means a much more simplier and secure setup. Add to that the AES encryption and you have a very secure system.

If your looking for a good solution then check out the eval, give it a shot and I’m sure you will be happy.