Thursday, October 07, 2010

gist.com with Lotus Notes plugin. Good, but needs improvement.

Having purchased my Android (Desire) phone, and using Ubuntu as the primary workstation, my main frustration is waiting for Android Lotus Traveler, which I've seen is work on progress.

While waiting, one of my colleagues pointed me towards gist.com, which aggregates contacts from gmail, gmail contacts, linkedin, android (my choices, there are others like facebook and twitter which I don't and will never use). So, besides that, which is looking good, back at my frustration: sync contacts and calendar from my business client to the Android phone.

On gist.com site there's a plugin which installs as a plugin into the Notes 8.5.x client. However, it wants to search my business mail to gather contacts ? WTF ? No way, this is trouble. So I did a pronto uninstall and decided to post here the use-cases I see for such plugin, maybe the dev team will listen:

1. This Notes plugin would allow me to configure a local Notes database containing contacts. Be it the default local names.nsf or another .nsf, which is my case.
2. This Notes plugin would allow me to configure a local database for calendaring information.

More comments:
- Do not scan my business mail as I will not allow it, for obvious reasons: security compliance, confidential information which goes into your site, and so on.
- Storing my personal contacts on your site is my choice. Business information is not my choice.

So towards the gist.com dev team: thanks, this is good work, please improve the Lotus Notes plugin before Lotus Traveler for Android hits the market :)