Salesforce.com announced on October 1, 2011 that no new activations of ‘Connect for Notes’ would be supported, leaving new Lotus subscribers without a email syncing and logging tool. By withdrawing support for ‘Connect for Notes’ , Salesforce.com highlighted the inherent contradiction in its entire email integration strategy. Instead of developing a cloud-based email syncing and logging service like Match My Email that would be consistent with Salesforce.com ‘No Software’ marketing and branding theme, the company opted to develop software plug-ins to major email clients like Microsoft Outlook, Google Gmail and Lotus Notes. For a company that has rejected the client/server model for cloud computing, promoting software plug-ins to only the major groupware clients amounts to a betrayal of its entire value proposition. For this reason, email syncing and logging has been characterized as Salesforece.com’s #1 pain point.
Furthermore, by focusing on only the major email clients, Salesforce.com does not offer an email syncing solution for the users of hosted email services in the cloud like GoDaddy, Rackspace, Network Solutions, Yahoo!, 1&1, gmx.de and many, many others.
Salesforce.com does not offer a platform independent email syncing and logging solution like Match My Email.
Match My Email offers the best cloud-based email syncing and logging service for Salesforce.com. It works with every hosted or managed email service, because it is based on Open Standards, Open Software and Linux. Moreover, because Match My Email is strictly cloud-based it only requires a username and password. No software downloads or upgrades or maintenance is ever required. That means that it is always compatible and up-to-date with the operating system and middleware supporting your desktop, laptop, iPad, iPhone, smarphone, tablet, Andriod phone, or Blackberry email solution.
What appears to have happened with Lotus Notes is that IBM continues to re-architect their groupware solution to leverage other features of Websphere and in the process changed something in the Lotus Notes data structure. For some unannounced reason, Salesforce.com decided not to upgrade the Connect for Notes plug-in software to make it work with these changes.
It is also true that Lotus Domino, the server side of the Lotus Notes solution, is quirky — robust and feature-rich but quirky like all IBM software. Though it is compatible with the IMAP email standard that underlies 99% of all email solutions, Lotus Domino handles SENT folders in a very peculiar way. Not to worry. The Match My Email support staff has handled these configuration quirks many times and has a Wiki article on how to handle them.
