RIM type solution for Pocket PCs

[king-pong]

I'm currently doing research for a planned implementation of Blackberry into our corporate environment. I know I've read about blackberry-ish functionality with PPC phone edition devices. Does anyone have any documentation or comparison information they can refer me to?

I'd really like to know how well email "push" technology will work on Pocket PCs, how scalable and manageable it is, etc... I'd much rather use PPCs than blackberrys.

TIA

[Matt Kitchen]

It all depends on if you have access to or if your office is using an Exchange server. If it/you are then setting up push via ActiveSync on your PPC is relatively easy and pretty effictive. Still not as streamlined as Blackberry, but its pretty good.

[Chris Spera]

I've been using Smartner Duality for Exchange and its great! You can check out http://www.smartner.com/products/index.html for more information.

The software is subscription based: $50US for a year, $5US for a month.

[Matt Kitchen]

club i-mate has a free one year subscription to their exchange server if you have purchased an i-mate phone. I got it configured, but the push was EXTREMELY delayed. Ah well. I have heard good things about smartner as well. I might give them a try here in the future...

[JvanEkris]

I'm investigating the options for Push-email and appointments as well. Both Itellisync and ExtendedSystems provide servers (being able to connnect to Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes) and dedicated clients that are capable of push traffic. An added benefit is that they are capable of remote management of these devices: they can even "kill" a device remote....

Jaap

[tekhound]

I use Good Technology's (www.good.com) Goodlink Server. It works pretty much like a Blackberry Enterprise Server, except the server is FREE. You pay annual fees for each device client, and with the cost of the unlimited data with t-mobile, i end up paying about as much as i do for my blackberry service only from nextel.

One of the coolest new features is the ability to get data from GPRS, CDMA, Bluetooth® (select models only), and GPRS/Wi-Fi (select models only). The current build works with pocket pc phones running WM2003SE (like my PDA2K) and fully supports landscape mode (which makes reading email much easier).

Goodlink wirelessly syncs Mail, Calendar, Address Book, Tasks and Notes in your exchange server mailbox. The rumor mill has indicated that the next version will have multiple folder sync and more access to other folders in the exchange mailbox.

Let me know if you are intereted and I can put you in touch with my sales rep.

-Michael

[MitchellO]

Couldn't you use the built in inbox application (or Messaging on some devices like my XDA Mini) for automatic download of email? You can set it to check for email every minute or so, and it downloads it automatically. You can set it to stay on the server too so you can get it on your normal PC. You can reply to your messages too. Plus, its free and takes no extra memory!

[tekhound]

Yes...as long as you can get to it. My email is behind my corporate firewall on a server that does not have a public IP. That is the beauty of PUSH technology.

The PUSH server sits inside my private network where my mail server is located. It hooks into the exchange server and monitors my mailbox. As soon as it sees a new message, it converts it to plain text and forwards it to a distributiution server outside my network. It uses a special encryption wrapper that prevents any other server or device of reading it except for my PDA2K that has the decrpytion key.

The distrubtion server uses my imei number to find my PDA2K and forwards it to me as soon as my PDA2K is available on the cell network (or WiFi if you have the newest version).

[MitchellO]

Yeah, that is pretty good. i suppose thats your only option with security like that. it would be ok if you use a standard pop3 account. I use with gmail.

[JvanEkris]

Yes...as long as you can get to it. My email is behind my corporate firewall on a server that does not have a public IP.I find this very hard to believe since someone (a SMTP server) has to deliver mail as well. It could be portforwarded buy the router, but then it is simply adding a port in the forwarding-list on the router......

Jaap

[tekhound]

My firewall has a NAT conversion from my public MX record to my internal mail server allowing only SMTP traffic to be passed thru to the internal server.

I've played with different configurations and I felt that it would be easier to allow an internal system that I control to push out the messages, instead of opening up a ton of ports and worried what bored hacker might be doing to my system with too many ports open.

If you have a cheaper way that takes 10 minutes to setup, provides no holes in my firewall, makes sending and receiving messages completely seamless and the reciepient doesn't know wether I am typing the message from my PDA or in Outlook (because the goodlink client sends the message back through my mail system as my corporate email account) I would love to hear it.