• Message sent directly to pager: "Dan_Velasco@idg.com|Meeting| Can you attend a meeting in San Francisco on Wednesday?"

• Message sent through Mobile Services for Domino: "F:DV S:Meeting B: Can U attend a mtg in SF on Wed?"

The first email was 85 characters including spaces, and the second was 50 characters including spaces. I could have made the message sent via the Mobile Services even smaller if I'd stripped out the spaces and capitalized the first letter of each word, which is one of the options you have. With MSD, you can be cheaper than Jack Benny at a Kmart Blue Light Special. No doubt about it, MSDCanSaveYouMoney. You no longer have to decide, "Your pager or your life."

Wireless Domino Access
If you were one of the lucky ones to go to Florida last January for Lotusphere, you probably remember the yellow phones. Or, if you were really lucky, you were one of the one thousand people who got a phone to keep. The phones ran on AT&T's PocketNet service and were set up to access information (including email and schedule information) on Domino servers through Mobile Services for Domino 1.0. That's the phone I used for my testing. You can see what it looks like in Figure E.

FIGURE E


Love it or hate it, here's a picture of the infamous yellow phone, a Mitsubishi T250. Roll over picture for a larger image.

I have to admit that I used my cell phone at Lotusphere mainly to call one of my coworkers and taunt her with the fact that I was at Disney World and she wasn't. The data service on the phone was somewhat patchy during the show, which is understandable given the fact that there were a thousand of them in a very concentrated area. I also hadn't given anyone my Lotusphere-specific email address, so I didn't really have any messages to check. On top of that, I couldn't figure out how to enter characters into the phone. I guess that's what happens when they give you more sales pitch than practical training and then send you off to the Lotusphere party to drink yourself silly. I was lucky I was able to even dial the phone.

It wasn't until recently, when I managed to get ahold of a server and add MSD 1.0, that I really saw the power of being able to check my email via the phone. It's a lot different when you're dealing with your own data. I almost peed my pants when I first got it working. The only difficulty I had was that I originally installed Mobile Services for Domino on a server behind our firewall. Therefore, I couldn't get it to work, since Port 80 was closed.

Once I put it on a server outside the firewall, however, it worked beautifully. All I had to do on the phone was put in the correct URL (in the format http://servername/cgi-bin/setuser.exe) and enter in my user name and password, just as I would do from an Internet Browser.

There was nothing on the server that I needed to configure in order to get Wireless Domino Access working. The first time you access the Domino server from your phone, you are prompted for both your user name and password. Thereafter, you just need to put in your password since the server remembers the device you're using.