All Articles Tagged exchange

Warning: We may get medium-geeky here for moment. Adjust your pocket-protectors accordingly.

Apple is using the iPhone to crack their way into the enterprise. No big surprise there. What is surprising, however, is just how Sun Tzu their being about it. How so?

Bottom line, for an end-user, the interface is the app. Sure, we recognize names like Exchange, ActiveSync, even BES, but for most typical users, firing up Outlook or switching on their Blackberry IS their email. They don’t see what’s going on programmatically behind the scenes, don’t care what protocol is hand-shaking and packetizing their data as it zips from server to server in its chaotic relay from sender to receiver. They just see their email, and they just know that it was there when they needed it.

Given that, Apple licensing Exchange ActiveSync becomes more than just interesting. Why? Because they didn’t buy Outlook. They’re making their own MobileMail app which will seamlessly handle Exchange, but, oh by the way, will also handle MobileMe (the new .Mac refresh already billed as Exchange for the rest of us), as well as the usual Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.

So, for the end user, ActiveSync disappears behind the MobileMail iPhone interface. And if they have a home account, be it MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo!, or whatever, the differences become less and less apparent (especially as push-like technologies propagate the different services), and in the end, ActiveSync disappears and people just think of their MobileMail app.

Meanwhile, the technologies behind MobileMail, with the advent of Snow Leopard Server, get more interesting, especially with Apple offering open, standards-based protocols like IMAP IDLE, and developing and releasing to the Open Source community similar code like CalDAV for push calendar and now, CardDAV for push contacts.

All of a sudden, a business could run an Exchange-like server without any Microsoft like licensing fees (which anyone who has dealt with them can tell you are money trap unto themselves).

Most interesting of all, if a business had deployed iPhones and they decided to switch from Exchange to Snow Leopard (or any *nix server using the FOSS implementations on their own), their end users may not even notice.

Roughly Drafted has more on Snow Leopard and its possible implications for Exchange/SharePoint users.

Roughly Drafted, the passionate little partisan site that could, is back with a look at why Apple would choose to license ActiveSync from Microsoft while at the same time championing more open standards like IMAP and CalDAV with Leopard Server.

Having suffered under the anti-trust encrusted fist of Microsoft previously with both Excel (originally launched on Mac) and Internet Explorer (which at one time shipped with OS X) to name but two examples of Redmond’s penchant for partnercide, Roughly Drafted explains how licensing a technology is different than licensing an an application. Namely, if you rely on a partner to deliver an application as your solution, your customers grow accustomed to and invested in that solution, and you become dependent on and, ultimately subject to, that partner (and the brutish manipulations thereof). However, if you license a technology and build your own application, your customers see only your front end and if ever a partner attempts to surreptitiously bury twelve inches of pointy steel between your shoulder blades, you can always license a competing technology — or switch the back-end to your own, already existing, technology.

In fact, as Apple develops its own Mac OS X Server integration with the iPhone, and develops tight integration with its own .Mac services on a subscription basis, it can wean iPhone users from Exchange Server toward its own products using the powerful incentive of much lower infrastructure and per user costs. However, there won’t be any customers to entice if the iPhone doesn’t first ship support for Exchange.

Having lived and worked through the rise of Internet Explorer 6 and the amazing power, convenience, security nightmare, and proprietary market-grab it created, and the even more compelling, insidious sameness of Exchange Server, I both appreciate the concepts Microsoft brought to the business table and detest the method in which they brought them. Why?

Communication needs to be free (as in freedom from single-vendor lockdowns) and small and medium sized businesses need the ability to be able to move to and from whichever service provides the best capability at the best price to suit their needs. IMAP IDLE and CalDAV may not be the solution, but they’re part of getting away from the problems of Exchange, and if the iPhone can sneak them into more IT shops, and into the mindsets of more be-fud’ed IT departments, then sneak away!

What do you think?

During the iPhone SDK Roadmap event today, Apple strolled up to RIM, slipped out a glove, dropped a brick into it, and slapped out one “boom” of a challenge.

Blackberry is an email monster, no doubt about it. Intoxicating “push” delivery and back-end IT administration have made it the darling of the enterprise world. But it isn’t without problems: due to the centralized server-model RIM utilizes (where all mail is collected by RIM prior to being pushed out to end-users), there’s a single point of failure for all Blackberry users everywhere (as seen in two recent, service-wide outages) — and a single point of exploit as well (where an attack on RIM’s server could compromise the privacy and security of the entire user base).

Read on for more!

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Again with the Apple Insider analyst tea-leaf reading, we get word from Shaw Wu of American Technology Research that Steve Jobs will spend some time during Thursday’s iPhone SDK Event announcing enhanced support for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus corporate email “solutions” (having worked in IT, I’m entitled to add the quotes.)

Wu believes it “more likely” that iPhone’s corporate support will come as a result of internal development rather than licensing technologies like Microsoft’s ActiveSync and/or RIM’s Blackberry Connect, but only time and El Jobso will tell for sure.

Given that Apple pre-announced “enterprise” for the event, and their past job listing (no longer online) for a “motivated, highly-technical Exchange test/sync engineer with excellent problem solving and communication skills,” this could be a very safe bet.

Either way, it looks like crackberry addicts and active exchangers alike may soon have iPhone pushers joining them in desperate need of instant email fixes. (Which, of course, is seen as very necessary to increasing the iPhone’s penetration of corporate accounts.)

figure 1: Folks, I’m just as surprised as anyone to see their logo here.

iPXSync is another product on the way that aims to provide Exchange compatibility for the iPhone. It looks like they’ll make creative use of IMAP to sync both email and non-email items (like tasks, contacts, and appointments) to mail folders, and that means over-the-air syncing, and if you delete one from the iPhone, it will be deleted from the server as well. They are running a free registration beta at the moment, and since this service doesn’t require extra software to be installed on the Exchange server itself, it’s an Outlook Web Access web scraper. This service is a lot like Synchronica, on which we’ve reported before. As a side note, Synchronica is still running a free trial of their service. Ah, competition. It makes things better.

I haven’t heard a peep out of Microsoft for quite some time; not really since Mossberg’s D5. Nonetheless, Microsoft is in the news today.

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