I spoke with Diane Ungersma, Product Manager for Pylon with iAnywhere, about the license thing, because if it was a bit of a pain for me, I thought is could be a pain for other people and for iAnywhere. She assured me that while they see occasional requests like mine, it's not very common. So you probably won't have that problem.

So what's it like?
Actually, the new Pylon is not much different from the old version when in use, a bit faster, but I have to say, a tad less reliable too. There was also a little bonus which I'll get to later.

I know, you want more details on usage. So here it comes.

For starters, Pylon comes with help that's delivered both as HTML pages and as a PDF. The HTML pages are best for quick reference on the screen. They're well indexed, and easy to get around, but are not enormously detailed. The PDF is best used to print a manual, if that's what you want. These help pages do make configuration easy, but nowhere does it explain the details of exactly how items are synchronized, or what the detail field mappings are, and to be honest, some of the configuration details would have been a mystery if I had no previous Pylon experience. Some of them still are.

Next is configuration. In this 5.2.2 version of Pylon, the only configuration option is to use a separate database. You can no longer keep the configs in the personal address book location documents. I used to think the location thing was cool, but I've upgraded Notes so many times since then, and manually updated personal address book designs with the Pylon subform each time, that I now fully endorse the decision to move to only using the config database.

Using it at different locations worked just as expected. As far as mail-database items, mail, calendar, and to-dos, it seems to be location sensitive in that it uses the mail file as defined by the current Notes location. Contacts are expected to be in the local names.nsf, and the sync of Notes journal to Palm memodb expects to use a local journal database, but you can change all this.

Pylon Pro databases can also be local or server-based, too. I'd suggest that if you are setting up Pylon on a laptop that's only sometimes network-connected, you sync Pylon Pro only with local databases. If you set up a sync with a server database, you will get an error on that database if you sync when off-line. The sync continues, but only after quite a long pause.

The configuration database itself is a bit of a strange mixture of old and new when it comes to database design. It still uses an old Notes 4 folder pane, for example, and the views are bit arcane, but the configuration forms are mostly pretty straightforward to use and reasonably pretty to look at. It's simple to set up simple things, but there is plenty of flexibility, so much so that you do need to consider exactly how you want to work so that you can set up the synchronizations appropriately. The help view shown in the folder pane doesn't actually contain any help documents, and as I said before, the supplied electronic help documentation doesn't help much with the geeky end of configuration either.