Devices for wireless Exchange access
To the everlasting dismay of my dear wife, Arlene, I love gadgets. However, one gadget has won her favor—my Kyocera QCP 6035 smartphone—because it gives me wireless access to our home Microsoft Exchange Server system.
Wireless access to Exchange mailboxes is a growing demand. If you, too, want to impress your spouse (or boss) by providing wireless access to Exchange data, the first step is to understand your selection of wireless devices, a bit about how they work, and the more exotic platforms they involve (i.e., not your typical Microsoft Outlook client and TCP/IP dial-up, LAN, or WAN connections).
Wireless devices for accessing Exchange mailboxes fall into two basic categories: devices that communicate directly with your Exchange server and devices that require some kind of middleware. Within these two categories, you find a bewildering array of protocols, software adapters, and other paraphernalia. None of these devices are superfast. For example, wireless Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) transmits at a blazing 19.2Kbps. However, 19.2Kbps is better than nothing, and vendors design their products to work within low-bandwidth environments.
The BlackBerry Family
Research In Motion's (RIM's) BlackBerry is arguably the most well-known wireless Exchange-access device. Understanding why people call the device "CrackBerry" or "The Homewrecker" is easy: When you get used to having email access everywhere, you tend to use email everywhere.
BlackBerry uses the Mobitex wireless packet data protocol to make this mail-on-the-go possible. Cingular Wireless and its affiliates offer Mobitex service in most metropolitan areas throughout the United States and Canada (and even in the small Alabama town where I live). Services for other parts of the world are in the works. Because Mobitex is essentially an extended paging protocol, you have BlackBerry service most places you have pager service.
If your Blackberry handheld isn't visible to the network (e.g., you're outside the coverage area, your batteries are low, you're on an airplane), RIM stores your messages until you can receive them. In addition, you can generate and accept meeting requests from your handheld. Messages you send from your handheld go through the Mobitex network to RIM's network center. BlackBerry's message-sending approach offers some nifty bonuses: the Global Address List (GAL) is visible on the handheld, and messages you send also appear in your desktop's Sent Items folder—even when you're still on the road. BlackBerry Software 2.1 and later can also synchronize Calendar data.
BlackBerry offers two Exchange-access options. Your first option is BlackBerry Internet Edition, which supports only one mailbox. You install this edition's BlackBerry Desktop Redirector component on your Outlook client machine. The redirector compresses and encrypts outgoing email, then sends it through SMTP to RIM's network center, which wirelessly relays the message to your device. Only your handheld can decrypt the messages from your redirector. Filter rules let you specify, by size and sender, which messages the redirector sends to your device.
The bad news about BlackBerry Internet Edition is that the Outlook client PC needs to be running and connected to your Exchange server for the redirector to do its thing. If that PC is a docked laptop that you need to take with you when you go mobile, you're out of luck. Likewise, no email for you if something kills your Outlook session.
Because BlackBerry devices are so popular, you'll likely have multiple users needing BlackBerry access, and you'll likely want to centrally manage your BlackBerry services. In this situation, the second Exchange-access option, BlackBerry Enterprise Edition, makes more sense. The enterprise edition runs under a service account on your network. BlackBerry Enterprise Edition picks up clients' email, compresses and encrypts it, then uses an Internet connection to send the email to RIM's network center, which then routes the email to its recipients. An obvious advantage is that the desktop client doesn't need to be online for the handheld to receive email. However, BlackBerry Enterprise Edition is more expensive, and as of this writing, doesn't run on Exchange 2000 Server systems (but does deliver to Exchange 2000 mailboxes). For more information about BlackBerry, see Anneliese Walsh, "BlackBerry," March 2001.
Compaq also sells BlackBerry devices and offers similar software and services. If your organization is a large Compaq account, you might get a better deal.
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