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This is the first of what I hope to be several posts about how to make your iPhone function in Corporate america when your corporation doesn’t directly support an iPhone.

I work for a pretty large fortune 1000 company.   We have a farm of Blackberry’s you could shake a stick at… I even have one of the corporate provided Blackberry’s… We have an internal Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) that provides real-time access to my Lotus Notes email and calendar.

The problem here is that I also have a personal cell phone that is truly what I carry ALL the time.  It’s an iPhone 3Gs and my company doesn’t recognize or support iPhone’s in our environment.   So a server side real-time solution is not possible, I have found a round-a-bout way to sync my Notes calendar from my corporate laptop pulling the data from my local Lotus Notes client.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• Lotus Notes client installed locally
• Access to your mail file locally or on your mail server
• A Google account (and know the credentials – username and password)
• Companionlink for Google

How it works?
The Companionlink for Google publishes your Lotus Notes calendar up to the Google Calendar service (tied to your google account).  Publishing can be done manually when you execute the Sync utility manually or you can automate the syncronization function in the application settings.  Then on the iPhone side you setup a Mail, Contacts, and Calendar connection for your Google account that is configured as Exchange ActiveSync.   Once published the changes in the Google calendar are pulled down to your iPhone over the air and almost in real time.

Setup and configuration of Companionlink
Installing Companionlink is pretty straight forward but you will need to know both your Google account username/password and your Notes Client (Notes ID) password.  Whether you want to access your calendar locally or on the Notes server.

you start by specifying your Google account info

Next you specify your PIM – in my case Lotus Notes but the application also support a host of other

Next you specify where the Notes client is installed locally on your PC and supply the password to your Notes client.

Form the Notes data tab you specify where your mail is located and its filename as well as the name and address book if you choose to sync your contacts from Notes (which I don’t).

The Auto Synchronization tab is set to manual by default.  This is where you get it to update on a schedule.

The sync from Notes up to Google Calendar is not complete.

Setup and configuration in iPhone
This section now configures your iphone to pull down your Google calendar into your iPhone in near real time and over the air.

Pulling the Google calendar down into your iPhone requires you to create an ActiveSync connection to google.

Select “Settings”
Select “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
Select “Add Account”
Select “Microsoft Exchange” (this is the activesync selection)
Enter in your Google Account information 0 the key is to set m.google.com as the server.

Overall thoughts on CompanionLink and limitations
Generally I love the product in that it works as advertised. Occasionally the CompanionLink application will prompt me for my Google account password again even though it is entered into the applications settings.  The only limitation with using ConpanionLink really is a limitation of the iPhone OS in that only one ActiveSync connection can be configured on the iPhone.  This means if you are already syncing with Exchange this wouldn’t be a solution for you but chances are if you are syncing Exchange you don’t really have a need for a product like CompanionLink anyway.