There's an abundance of wireless-capable devices and a growing number of networks to service them. How do you make your corporate e-mail available to staff when they're out of the office?
For many years now we have come to take for granted the basic mobile telephone system in Australia, however this generally has been limited to voice calls and some very low bandwidth and high cost data transfers (9600bps at timed mobile phone rates in most cases). Many enterprises are now looking to take that mobile platform one step further by seeking a convergent solution that ensures most forms of data communication are portable such as e-mail, calendar/appointments, contact management, database records, company documents, faxes, and even presentations are available while on the move. Many of the software packages we review here allow communication between these types of applications and mobile devices. However for the purposes of this article, we will be restricting it to e-mail access via mobile devices. It should be noted that many of these applications include the facilities to synchronise or backup your data between the mobile device and devices such as the network server or your desktop PC. However, our interest in this article was in real-time access to information via wireless, not backup or synchronisation via a cradle or cable.
Mobile devices come in several different form factors and many brands these days, from your mobile phone to your PDA, Tablet PCs right up to notebook PCs with wireless LAN or Bluetooth. Many of these devices have their own proprietary interface, especially mobile phones, and to some extent PDAs. Keeping this in mind, e-mail to mobile software has to be relatively platform-independent and highly configurable to enable an administrator to set it up to fit their individual users' devices. And just when IT managers thought that their lives were getting easier with standard operating environments (SOEs) and plug-and-play network appliances, someone must have decided that they can't be let off that easily.
Another factor to consider when deploying e-mail to mobile applications is the type of data connection that the devices utilise to access the information. Firstly we will assume that the mobile workers need their devices to be wireless. You could argue that they can run into a nearby Internet café and access their Web-based e-mail via the systems provided there, or they can access the Web-based e-mail from a client's Internet connection, but these users are then not entirely using a mobile technology solution. Granted they themselves are mobile, but their hardware equipment is not. Therefore the mainstream wireless data connections that we utilised in this comparison are General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Bluetooth, and Wireless LAN (WLAN) 802.11b, a, or g.
Each data connection has its own specific devices and areas of application. GPRS is generally run across the mobile phone connection and effectively gives users access to the wide area network (WAN) for their e-mail. Bluetooth is predominantly for the mobile device to connect via a personal area network (PAN); range is generally effective up to 10 metres. Bluetooth is also utilised as the connection between the PDA or notebook and a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone that then uses GPRS to access the network. And WLAN is utilised for mobile users either within their local office area or in one of the fast growing public hot spots--which work generally up to a 65-metre radius from the wireless access point.
GPRS is the slowest and most expensive connection (at around 2c per KB upload or download) that would suit this type of e-mail access. It is however the most likely connection to be used by the truly mobile user who is on the road at the moment. Both Bluetooth and WLAN connections are generally limited to specific physical locations and have limited ranges but provide higher bandwidth connections up to 55Mbps. While it is true that GPRS is also limited to mobile carrier networks and towers that support GPRS services, most of metropolitan Australia is now covered by these services.
In this article we looked at six applications, but there are plenty more available on the market that can create and handle interfaces between e-mail servers and mobile hardware. Here's how they went.
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