Smartphones are becoming more and more popular in businesses today along with the blackberries. If you have an Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Environment then you can take advantage of the Exchange Mobility feature, which enables your users with smartphones to sync their email, contacts and calendars. If you have an Exchange 2003 Enterprise Server Environment with Exchange Service Pack 2 then you can take advantage of not just syncing Email, Contacts and Calendars but SP2 Enables the following:
- Direct push is a new Exchange technology that maintains an open connection between the mobile device and the server. When new items arrive, they are automatically "pushed down" to the device.
- Remote wipe is a new feature that enables administrators to delete sensitive data from a lost or stolen mobile device. The administrator receives an acknowledgement that the device has been wiped after the task has been completed.
- Global address list (GAL) lookup enables users to receive contact information for users in the global address list from a mobile device. This feature helps users search for a person quickly, based on name, company, and so on.
- Policy provisioning allows administrators to make supported policies, such as device passwords, more secure by enforcing them in one of two modes:
- Allowing only devices that have policies to synchronize (Windows Mobile 5.0 and Microsoft Feature Pack)
- Allowing all devices, including older devices, to synchronize
- Support for certificate-based authentication
- Use of S/MIME to sign and encrypt mail
- Server-based synchronization of Tasks
If you have a Mobile Device that supports email and you want to sync your personal email or in fact your work email and you do not have Exchange Mobility or any other push/pull option in place, then www.emaoze.com is your answer.
I put a post up on my blog, before I had all the problems with my database and wiped it about emoze, however since then there have been some changes in it. Before the version I was using would only alow me to sync one of two ways:
- Install the emoze client on the phone and on my desktop and leave outlook open, as an email comes in it is also delivered to my mobile phone. (which was the option I was using as I was using it for my kemponline email.
- Install the emoze client on your phone and sync it with your Outlook Web Access (OWA).
The version now also has support for Lotus Notes and also GMail which is a winner for me as I recently migrated my kemponline MX Record to Google Apps so my email is not hosted by GoogleMail.
I installed the client on my phone and set it all up and it connected to my GoogleMail no bother. I sent my self a test email from my work account and with in 15 seconds I had received it on my phone. The best thing was, when I replied to it the email I sent was sitting in my sent items on GoogleMail.
I have to say I was very impressed with it all and how it works. I am just intrigued on how it actually works as it is not really a push solution is it??? as the client is polling the server continuously. It will be interesting to see how the battery life on the phone copes with the phone constantly connected to the GPRS network.