Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Lotus Notes Traveler on Android - It just works! (But there's a gotcha)

Unless you've been under a rock for the past 24 hours, you may have missed the news from Ed Brill that Lotus Notes Traveler for Android is officially available to implement in your infrastructure!  While that's a huge win for the Lotus product line, there is one issue you need to be aware of.
I was fortunate enough to be part of the beta testing group for Android and one of the things that came up during testing is the Android, by default it seems, does not like Domino, or any, self-signed server certificates.  As you may know, installing Traveler on any mobile device requires you to use the devices browser and access the Traveler web page to download the client.  That's worked great in the past for our iOS and Windows Mobile, (not 7 of course), devices.  Android will allow you to browse to the site, and you will get a certificate warning, but it will not download the installer.  It will appear to be downloading, but no data will be received.  Again, this is not an IBM limitation, but an Android limitation.  So far, the workaround has been to email the .apk file to the users Gmail account and run it from there.  Once the installer is configured, everything else works fine.  I've read that some people have been able to download and install using Opera, Dolphin or Firefox for the Android, but I didn't have any luck. 
So, feel free to share your stories here if you wish on Android implementation.  And don't forget, the great thing about Lotus Notes Traveler is once installed, it just works!

9 comments:

Mitch Cohen said...

Andy - I posted this morning "Why not put Traveler in the Android Market" the scenario you present here is another one which would be resolved if IBM would use the Android Market to distribute the client http://curious.li/erjt1t

Andy Donaldson said...

I agree 1000%! Solves the issue with implementation.

Thomas Adrian said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Andy Donaldson said...

@Thomas - The issue revolves around the Domino self-signed SLL certificate. Since it's not a "trusted" certificate, several in the beta group were unable to install it right off their own Traveler site because they, and I, had implemented that. The Android browser didn't trust the site to download the file. Do you have a "trusted" SSL cert on your server?

Thomas Adrian said...

I Just realized that. thanks

/Thomas

Lance said...

Anyone know definitively if encrypted emails can be read on the Android devices with Traveler?

Mat Newman said...

Confirming the SSL issue.

My recent install at a client uses a godaddy supplied certificate, no problem connecting to the client's traveler server and downloading/connecting with that configuration.

Unknown said...

How does installing traveler effect your default email and contacts/people?

Unknown said...

The "Traveler" in the Android market would solve another problem not mentioned, that is that AT&T will not allow customers to side-load apps, so the absence of Traveler in the market place means no AT&T customers using Traveler on Android (short of rooting of course) for the time being.