CommonTime's history stretches back some 25 years to the days when, in the words of Managing Director, Nigel Mackrill, "Wang was a successful computer company". Nigel and 3 of the 4 other owner-directors of the company worked together at Wang and then at Minitec, where they developed products for capacity planning, performance management, and self optimising servers. A clash of views 12 years ago saw Nigel and the other CommonTime founders leave Minitec and form the company that would eventually become CommonTime. "Our mission was to prove that the success of Minitec was down to us engineers, and not the entrepreneur that was running the company," says Nigel.

In the early years the team worked from home and chose Lotus Note to help them collaborate. An old colleague from Wang turned out to be one of the first Lotus business partners in the UK. "He needed some Notes API programming, and we had the skills," says Nigel. Their first venture into Notes development was a pager messaging gateway. As the company became more involved in Notes development the founders wanted to create products, not simply provide services. In those days Lotus Notes did not have a group calendar or scheduling features, so the team created one. They announced CommonTime, along with a change of company name, at LotusSphere; unfortunately at the same time Lotus announced they planned to add a similar feature. As a result CommonTime sold no more than a few thousand licenses.

This lack of success did not daunt Nigel and his colleagues. "We were really keen on Lotus Notes in its broadest sense," says Nigel. "We also liked the idea of mobile devices. We realised that a device like the Apple Newton had the power and communications capabilities to allow us to take concept of groupware and put it on hand held devices." So this became CommonTime's next project and resulted in a product called Cadenza (chosen for a musical theme to the company's product names) the forerunner of mNotes. "Again we demonstrated our prowess and visionary ability," says Nigel. "As Steve Jobs came back to Apple and killed off the Newton just as we launched our product."

Having made the investment the team stuck with Cadenza. When the Pocket PC arrived the product was about 4 years old, mature and, in Nigel's opinion "demonstrated a better understanding of Lotus Notes than any of our competitors have achieved, even today." As a result Cadenza became a success for CommonTime, selling in significant volumes. "Most of our sales were driven by individuals in organisations," says Nigel. "But this created us a problem, we ended up with a product that was very much focused on what end users wanted, but not focused on what IT departments wanted. Our competitors had the security and management story wrapped up. They had products that appealed to IT departments, at least until they were deployed and everyone found out how bad they were for the users. Our product was really hard to deploy, it did not have any of the tools that it needed, but if you did mange to get it deployed, you did not get grief from your users." In addressing these issues CommonTime recognised that many organisations do not like to tie themselves to one mobile platform, so started to look at other platforms.

CommonTime originally considered supporting Symbian OS back when it was still the operating system powering Psion's range of PDAs. A lack of perceived market opportunity and no support from Psion meant nothing happened. The impetus for seriously addressing Symbian OS devices came from customer pressure. "We are finding that many of our major corporate customers in Europe are users of Symbian OS devices," says Nigel. "So creating a port became a necessity."

It was this same customer demand which guided CommonTime to port to UIQ first. "When we look at our accounts UIQ is certainly the first demand, followed by Series 80 and with Series 60 coming in third," says Nigel. "It is however our intention to support all of them. Our Symbian OS development team is small, but growing, so we prioritised to complete UIQ first. UIQ also outperforms the Blackberry, which is something of a de-facto measure for corporate devices. By comparison Series 60 devices have short comings for the corporate user; we see them as more focused at the educated consumer."

Nigel had originally expected the Symbian OS development to be easy, and although it turned out to be easier than Palm, it was much harder than Pocket PC. The problems were not learning the APIs, which Nigel agrees are much better structure than rival platforms, rather it was shortcomings in the calendar and messaging applications which caused the problems.

"If you take most normal corporate Notes users, they will have their mail sorted into hundreds of folders," says Nigel. "In Symbian OS mail the folder hierarchy is really difficult to use, because they didn't countenance Notes style usage when they built the model. If you work the way the original designers had in mind it's easy, if you don't it gets hard. We work in the 'don't' camp." Nigel also points to similar problems with the Symbian OS calendar. "Users are looking for more than a simple system which lets them know what they are doing and when they should be doing it," says Nigel. "Our users are looking for a co-ordinated appointment system where people can book meetings, invite others, and book resources for the meetings such as rooms. Currently none of the Symbian implementations have got the UI presentation or the underlying data in place to support this. As a result we are having to build those capabilities ourselves. While Symbian OS is a lot more extensible than other platforms; some platforms, such as Windows Mobile already have that capability. Lotus Notes is really flexible, so you can have repeating meetings with exceptions on the location, time or name, in the Symbian OS calendar these exceptions get split out which is not something our users want. So unfortunately the current Symbian OS calendar and scheduling is too weak for corporate users. Having said that, Symbian OS devices win in the integration of contacts with the telephone, this is something at which Symbian OS and the licensees are miles better at than anyone else. They make fantastic telephones. In my mind the P910 is the best smartphone, from a voice standpoint, on the market today."

These issues meant that progress was initially slow; using the resource that had worked on CommonTime's other platform implementations. This slow progress meant CommonTime contemplated outsourcing the work at one time, but was put off by the time frames involved. With hindsight Nigel acknowledges that this third party quote was "probably telling the truth" about the projects complexity. The project eventually got going when CommonTime found its own dedicated Symbian OS resource.

After 3 years Nigel still sees a fully secure corporate version of CommonTime on Symbian OS as "2 or 3 months away", characterizing the current version as more of a personal solution. "Ultimately we underestimated the job. Pocket PC experience is really mature and I think we forgot how hard start-up work can be," says Nigel. "Even though our Symbian OS developer came from a competitor, we have been asking him to do things he was never asked to do by his previous company. So it has taken time to generate the skills."

So what about support from the developer programs? "If you have got a level of competence the questions that you tend to ask of these programs are often beyond the skills of the support staff," says Nigel. "And we have found it with almost every vendor we have ever dealt with. After all the people that can answer that type of question are not sitting on a support deck, they are doing critical things for the vendor." One relationship has gone a long way to overcoming these issues, and that is with Sony Ericsson. "We have a really good relationship with Sony Ericsson," says Nigel. "It lets us bypass the support desk and go deeper in their organisation, to the people who can answer the kind of question that we are asking."

Nigel points to the Blackberry as the goal these relationships need to attain. "Blackberry have a real advantage here as they make both ends of their solution, consequently the two ends work in harmony," says Nigel. "Any other device manufacturers need to work closely with companies like us, because getting the two ends of the solution to work together is critical for the enterprise."

For Nigel the relationship is of mutual benefit. "We sell most of our licenses in the USA, something approaching 70%," says Nigel. "Symbian OS devices don't sell well in the US. We believe we provide an opportunity for Symbian OS device manufactures to make contact with the kind of corporate customers they need to be successful in the US."

However, an organisation like CommonTime is at a disadvantage when it comes to dealing with companies like Symbian or the device manufacturers. "We are an engineering business," says Nigel. "Many of the companies that have profile are more marketing organisations. These companies have the money to get the ear of folks like Symbian, but I believe we are better placed to help Symbian get to the fundamentals of what you really need in these solutions."

Over the next 3 months CommonTime expect to release all their products, except mForms (a rapid application development tool) on Symbian OS platforms. mForms will follow later. "We actually see Symbian as being as important, if not more important than anything else," says Nigel. "We think they have a fantastic future and we are certainly seeing that Europe is very strong on Symbian OS. My prediction is that Symbian will turn out to be a very important platform for Common Time."

You can find out more about CommonTime on its website: www.commontime.com