I remembered seeing this hit the test servers over the summer and sadly I did not have the time nor energy at the time to play around with it. The new IBM Domino Mobile App (IDMA) for iOS was released to the public yesterday. I saw posts on several IBMers that I follow via RSS and Twitter detailing the news and links to the App Store to download it. IBM has a bit of documentation up here. Basically, you have to have an active license/subscription with IBM, have iOS 11.4+ or 12.1+ installed on your iPad, and have Domino 9.0.1 or 10.x running on your server (which is of course accessible via VPN or internet). Note: If you don’t have an ID vault, have your user.ID file already copied to your iPad!

According to IBM and HCL, they are planning a version of this app for Android, as well as an iPhone version. Honestly, that would be nice. I like things on my phone. And so far I’ve been pretty impressed with the iPad version. This app is very handy and I’ve had fun playing with it on my personal iPad over the last day or so. I could see a couple of our execs wanting this on their own iPads. Sadly my employer is moving away from Notes/Domino, but for the time being we are forcibly tethered to it for at least another year or so (by my own estimations maybe longer) due to business-critical applications that have not yet been moved to other platforms.

Also: IDMA gives me more of an excuse to unplug more at home, and I won’t have to have my laptop with me at all times if I have my iPad, as I can access everything else we use via cloud and VPN. Bully for me! :)

I was originally going to document the whole installation process, but honestly if you’ve installed Notes before, then you’ll find this is easy. And if not, there’s a great walk-through already by Gabby Davis on the Turtle Partnership blog.

You’ll be prompted to login when you launch the app, just as you would a regular Notes client. IDMA has a pretty simple interface and is pretty easy to navigate. My only real complaint so far is that you can’t type in the name of a database to open. (as I have a keyboard for my iPad and thus use it like a laptop LOL)

There doesn’t seem to be a way to add bookmarks. That’s another suggestion I have, because it would be nice to bookmark apps or views that are either hard to find or not easily accessed otherwise. I mean, if I have to click more than 2 things, I’d wanna bookmark that bitch! XD

I did notice when browsing the local file system that a replica had already been created. We have several Domino domain policies that create local replicas of certain key databases based on the user’s department and/or position, and the one in my screenshot below is created automatically for all users. That made me pretty happy, as was the confirmation that local databases are encrypted.

So far I’ve been able to do all kinds of normal things in the app. In fact, I received an ECL popup which I’ll admit made me squee a bit. (I am still a giant Lotus fangirl/nerd after all!) According to IBM documentation, there are limitations, but so far I’ve not had any serious issues.

HOWEVER, I do have a concern …

I looked at my person document in the Domino directory and noted that my iPad was not listed. I had really hoped that any device where this app is installed would be treated like any other Notes client and that listing updated, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I don’t know if this is on purpose or not, but that concerns me because that means that we can’t keep track of which devices have IDMA installed.

All in all though, not a bad start. I seriously wish this had come about a couple or three years ago. It might have made for a stronger argument for us to stay in Notes longer, but oh well. In the very least, it’s a new tool for me to use.