FIGURE B


Once the Pylon Conduit is installed, the configuration options are extensive. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Because these configuration settings reside in your Notes location document, you can have different settings for each connectivity environment in Lotus Notes. For instance, I have a minimal configuration for when I'm on the road and a more full featured option set for when I'm in the office. To switch between these two environments for the Pylon conduit, all that I need to do is change my location in Lotus Notes.

How well does it work?
Pretty darn well. Most of my HotSyncs take about 45 seconds and that's for all of the available applications. When there are no disruptions in your Notes environment, the conduit works perfectly. However, if you ever need to re-create a database or have copied and pasted documents, I've seen the Pylon conduit duplicate data on the PalmPilot. There is a workaround for this behavior documented on Globalware's web site.

As part of implementing a contact management application, we used the Pylon conduit to allow a small sales force to synchronize contact, calendar and to do information between Lotus Notes and the PalmPilot. There was not enough space in the PalmPilot for all 6,000 contacts so using the configuration options we were able to just move each sales person's specific contacts to his or her own PalmPilot device. They were able to add new, or edit existing, contacts on the PalmPilot and all of their additions or changes would synchronize to their laptops and then to the Notes server successfully. Each new sales person required approximately 10 minutes to configure their Notes environment to work with the Pylon Conduit.

Pylon support
This is another area where Globalware needs to change its existing policies. According to the manual:

"At this time support will be provided by sending an e-mail to pylon@gc.com or Pylon @ Globalware @ Notes Net. In the near future, a Notes discussion database will be available on the Internet for replication or for use through a Web browser."

At the time of this writing the discussion database was on their web site. Like most Notes discussion databases on the web, it operates excruciatingly slow at times and finding specific data can be a chore. In my opinion saying that you're never planning on offering live support is unrealistic. At $85 for each copy of the software, phone support (even a toll call) needs to be available to registered users of the product.

Over the course of the last three months I've also had occasion to call the company four or five times and the phone has never been answered by a human being, only an answering machine. In their defense, I have called them twice for issues which were not covered in the documentation and left a message asking for assistance. On both occasions the call was returned by the main developer of the conduit the same day.

Summary
While using this product, I was consistently left with the feeling that this product was written by people who really know and use Notes and really know the PalmPilot. If an option was necessary to make the software work in a variety of situations for a variety of users, the developers of the product implemented it.