June 28, 2007 | Posted By : Ravi Agarwal at 2:02 AM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (0)

iPhone & Microsoft Exchange Server? Myth or Fact?

I've never seen a more hyped-up product in the messaging world than the iPhone. At groupSPARK, we've been getting at least 2 calls or emails every day from our partners, who resell one of our SaaS offerings, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 hosting, about iPhone compatibility. Their customers are SMB's who depend on email to run their business. And being the genuis at marketing that Steve Jobs is, it seems that everyone is talking about the iPhone, which will be available on Friday through AT&T. Also, both Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal and David Pogue at the New York Times published reviews on the iPhone yesterday.

The big question we hear from potential iPhone buyers is: can the iPhone sync wirelessly with Microsoft Exchange Server? Well, based on the information that we've seen, the answer is a yes and a no. Microsoft offers its ActiveSync protocol for synchronization with mobile devices; ActiveSync allows for syncing of mail folders, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks wirelessly. Obviously devices running the Windows Mobile operating system include ActiveSync; however, other mobile devices can license the ActiveSync protocol for a minimum of $100k, as Nokia and Motorola did.

It appears like the iPhone will not come with ActiveSync - at least not in the initial release. I suspect that Apple will include ActiveSync in a subsequent release - confirmed by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley who believes that Apple has already licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft.. And I suspect that Apple is similarly looking to license BlackBerry Connect from RIM to suport wireless sync with BlackBerry Enterpriser Servers.

But, wait - Exchange users - there is still a way to make it work - partially! The iPhone does support IMAP Idle, also known as IMAP Push. However, IMAP only syncs the mail folders and not the Calendar, Contacts, or Tasks folders. So, you can at least sync your email from Exchange Server. However, your Exchange Server will have to have the IMAP port from the Internet, which is a security concern. Just make sure that you don't use regular IMAP because it transmits the username & password unencrypted; instead, you should use IMAP over SSL to ensure security.

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April 19, 2007 | Posted By : Ravi Agarwal at 10:49 PM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (2)

How NOT To Treat Your Customers

Unless you've been camping out in Acadia National Park (one of my favorite places to rock climb) for the past couple of days, you've undoubtedly heard of the major BlackBerry outage - on radio, television, or online. Hell, you may have even had to seek professional help to cope with your unexpected CrackBerry withdrawal.

Tuesday night, around 8:15 pm EDT, BlackBerry's network went down for about 9 hours. During this outage, all BlackBerry users across all mobile carriers in North America were unable to send/receive email. Yes, this means that government officials (White House, Congress, Homeland Security, etc.), executives in companies of all sizes, system administrators, and everyone else who relies on e-mail enough to spend an extra $40-70 per month for a BlackBerry data plan was down. We're talking about an estimated 5 million people who suffered this outage.

Just think about the possible risks of this outage - what if a major real-world disaster had also occurred that night (i.e., 9/11 or Katrina) and the government officials would not have been able to communicate quickly? What if you use your CrackBerry to receive alerts from your infrastructure and thus didn't know that a server went down?

At groupSPARK - the leader in Private Label Exchange Hosting, we provide BlackBerry Enterprise Server service to thousands of companies. In fact, being able to do two-way wireless synchronization (cradle-free) between a user's Microsoft Outlook data and their BlackBerry handheld - all the time, automatically - is often the acute need that convinces small businesses to adopt Hosted Exchange. Our monitoring system alerted us of backlogged messages to their servers in Canada; within 15 minutes we ascertained what was happening and alerted our support team - before a single partner contacted us about this issue from their customer.

What really bothered me is how BlackBerry handled this outage. They didn't reach out to any of their customers to alert and communicate with them about the issue. They didn't (and still have not) post a single word on their website about the outage; IT administrators had to call the cellular provider or BlackBerry directly, which meant waiting on hold for 1-2 hours, to find out why their BlackBerry Enterprise Server wasn't synchronizing with their CEO's handheld. Worst of all, they still haven't explained what caused the outage and what they're doing to prevent it from happening again. It really seems like they didn't care much about their customers' pain.

This is not the first time that BlackBerry has had a major outage. I'm sure that IT teams around the world have since been meeting to figure out ways to mitigate this risk to their organizations. I think that some of them will think more about moving their BlackBerry users to a Windows Mobile-based device. Unlike the BlackBerry architecture where all data goes through their servers in their datacenter, the data for a Windows Mobile device travels directly (over the cellular network) from the handheld to the Microsoft Exchange Server that houses their mailbox. While a Windows Mobile device isn't quite as proficient for messaging as a BlackBerry yet, risk of downtime may be the deciding factor.

Btw, BlackBerry is having their annual conference, Wireless Enterprise Symposium, in three weeks. Too bad I won't be there to see the fireworks from their customers voicing their frustrations!

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