One of the advantages of earlier releases of Notes was that it offered a true multi-platform solution. The R5 code stream, was the last with the Designer and Administrator clients.

When Notes 6 was released in 2002, there was no native OS X installer. To install Notes 6.0 on the Mac you had to perform the install in OS 9 and the reboot into OS X or use the Classic OS 9 emulator. This was resolved in Notes 6.01 with a native OS X installer. This was the first release of Notes supported on Mac OS X, which was released in 2000.

Notes 7.02 was the first release in the 7.x code stream to include Mac support. 7.02 was supported on Mac OS 10.4.x. There was not a Lotus Notes 8.0 Mac client when it was released in August 2007.

Notes 8.5
Lotus Notes 8.5 was released in December 2008 and is supported on the Intel based Mac OS 10.5.5 and later. It supports both the standard and basic client installs as well as multiuser installs.

One disappointing feature that is not available is Smart Upgrade. This means to upgrade, you must manually install the client. Upgrading from ND 6.x is not supported. This is due to the fact that the 6.x code stream was developed for the PowerPC chip set.

7.x is universal code and will work on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. 8.5 is supported on the Intel Macs only. 8.5 also was released on Ubuntu, Red Hat Linux, and SUSE Linux.

iNotes on the Macintosh
iNotes on the Macintosh was initially introduced in the 7.02 code stream and is officially supported on the Mac for release 8.5.The supported browser for the Mac, is Firebox. Safari is not officially supported.

iNotes Ultralite is the feature set that is available on the iPhone. This is part of the mail template and no additional installs are needed. No configuration is needed on the phone either. Ultralite allows users to get mail, calendar and contacts from their Lotus Notes mail files on the iPhone. iPhone users are directed to the Ultralite UI by default when using the URL to their mail file.

Ultralite is available for the iPhone and Firefox web browser only. Desktop Safari and IE are not supported at this time for Ultralite. To obtain the full iPhone experience, one should use Mobile Safari.

iNotes Ultralite mode can be accessed normally through a Web browser by accessing your mail account through Domino Web Access and changing the mode setting to iNotes Ultralite. Optionally you can change the UI parameter to: ?opendatabase&ui=dwa_ulite.

Barry Rosen is currently an IBM Certified Managing Consultant with IBM Software Services for Lotus. During the last three years, Mr. Rosen has worked on several large messaging and migration projects as well as performed Domino upgrades and messaging assessments. Before that, he was a Software Engineer in Lotus Support for over five years. While in support Mr. Rosen was on several teams specializing in mail routing, Lotus Notes Client, calendaring and scheduling, and server core. He focused on clustering, Lotus Notes for the Macintosh, and rooms and resources.