According to a recent poll by mobile e-mail solutions giant Visto Corp., seven in ten mobile professionals expect to be e-mailing from their mobile devices by the end of the year. And, even in 2005, an Ipsos survey indicated that at least 40 million Americans wanted mobile access to their e-mail. Today, more than ever, a significant portion of a typical company's operating ability is directly dependent on its e-mail capacities. Since no one is always in front of a PCfield workers and road warrior types in particular—an efficient system to manage, triage, reply, and forward e-mail on the go has become critical.
In this regard, Exchange 2007 definitely offers up some very real, practical advantages over Exchange 2003 SP2. When combined with a WM6 device, the benefits grow exponentially. The question, however, is whether these benefits justify the cost of investment. Is it worth it for organizations to spend thousands of dollars in both device upgrades and server restructuring? What about the hours of labor required to migrate? And, last but not least, will the end users be comfortable with the changes? Often, an upgrade will mean increased features, but if the learning curve is too steep, then the hours spent training personnel and providing support will outweigh the potential benefits. Bottom line: will the ROI (Return on Investment) justify the cost?
In this article, we will examine what the E2007/WM6 upgrade combination offers and how it improves productivity, specifically with a focus on the mobile device side. By the time were done, you should have a clear idea of how to leverage the new features to benefit your company or yourself.
HTML e-mail
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) e-mail allows for imbedded images, specific fonts, bullets, and many of the other visual aids we rely on for processing data. Until now, these kinds of e-mails did not display properly on a WM device. Even worse, if a user would respond from a smartphone, he would effectively break the HTML component of the e-mail, thereby limiting other PC-based recipients after him from viewing the HTML portion. Note that a WM 5.0 device, as long as its exchanging with a 2007 server box, will not break the HTML thread for others, although the device itself will not be able to display it. Traditionally, newsletters are sent in HTML format, as well as many corporate presentation type e-mails. Understand, however, that an HTML e-mail occupies more storage space than a text based e-mail, and WM6 still does not allow storing of the e-mail database on a memory card. Messaging on the WM6 device I tested does a terrific job of preserving the HTML content, and it displayed everything I threw at it without a hitch. Unfortunately, although a horizontal scroller appears when necessary as well as a Text Size menu, there is no zoom option, so you can't pick the percentage that you want to view content at.
Increased Mobile Office/SharePoint-UNC productivity
Microsoft has acceded to the demands of smartphone OS fans (now called WM 6 Standard) and included a mobile version of Office. Unfortunately, it can't create a new document from scratch, but a workaround is available. Export a blank Word or Excel document from your PC to device, open it when you want to create a new document, and save it under a different file name.
Accessing a remote SharePoint/UNC (Unified Naming Convention) document has become completely streamlined—receive a SharePoint/UNC link via e-mail, click on it, and it downloads an attachment for quick viewing. This will work even outside of your VPN or corporate network, since Exchange does the heavy lifting here, and fetches the document on your behalf with your credentials.
Unified Messaging
