Quite simply it is two things: “push” technology and a useable keyboard. You don’t have to be a genius to realize this. You simply need to look at the success of the RIM BlackBerry platform, the current king of the hill when it comes to mobile email.

The BlackBerry’s “push” architecture makes synchronization a thing of the past.  If your BlackBerry is powered on and you have network coverage, your device is in sync. This is a very good thing because synchronization is a concept that non-technical users have never really wanted to deal with, and frankly never will.

It is possible to get this kind of experience with platforms other than RIM’s – using Good Technology’s products today, or Windows Mobile 2005 and Exchange 2003 SP3 tomorrow we’re told. However, there’s a bit more effort involved than just calling up your local mobile carrier and ordering a neat bundle of a bundle of BlackBerry devices and a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).

Once you have push, some type of keyboard is absolutely essential. SMS from a numeric keypad maybe fine for the kids but it’s not for most professionals. Unless you’re comfortable conversing with your colleagues exclusively in the Internet shorthand of “leet”, a QWERTY keyboard is a must to compose responses to the emails that have been pushed to you.

RIM’s competitors are beginning to recognize this as well; most notably with the recent Treo devices and an increasing number of Windows Mobile products. While reading email keeps you up-to-date, the true value of mobile messaging can’t be realized without the ability to address the 30% or so of messages that require a quick response.

A trend to keep an eye on is the emergence of very small, light wireless keyboards such as those offered by ThinkOutside.  This combination might offer the best of both worlds - the ability to carry and use a small phone-sized device but still having a keyboard available for use when the need arises to dash off a critical response.

Continue reading ‘User Requirements for Mobile Messaging Devices’

Blogs are a very good way to share information.

However, almost all blogs today are very informal. It’s usually fine to toss out casual opinions and indulge in a spot of fun. Blogs are seen as democratic technologies that let anyone communicate opinions and information with anyone that’s interested. They’re like latter-day email bulletin boards in this regard.

There’s another way of looking at blogs, where they are seen as low-in-efforts and low-in-cost ways of publishing information. This parallels high quality moderated bulletin boards, where considerated thought is given to published items.

This is, by the way, how Ferris Research sees its blog: as a convenient publishing vehicle for considered observations by an expert. We don’t mind if the opinion is incorrect one time in 15 or 20; but usually, the blog item should be correct.

… David Ferris

Mailshell is not a well-known name. The firm specializes in spam and phishing control software, for other software vendors. Thus its clients include Oracle, CyberGuard, Panda Software, ZyXEL, Broderbund and Lyris, who have included MailShell’s software into their own offerings and private labelled them.

The firm is small, tightly run, privately held, and appears to have healthy finances. A recent announcement, Message Partners Introduces "Powered by Mailshell" Spam and Phishing Protection, suggests Mailshell is trying to get more public visibility for its brand.

When Exchange has problems, it can be very hard to detect where the actual problem lies. For example, Exchange 2000 and 2003 rely on Active Directory.  Active Directory in turn, depends on an effective DNS implementation. A poorly performing or misconfigured DNS can cause message delivery problems in Exchange, and a large number of seemingly unconnected alerts. The actual cause is unlikely to be apparent.

Today’s administrators use products like Microsoft Operations Manager and NetIQ AppManager to manage their environments. While these products are good at pointing out problems on specific servers, they’re not good at correlating problems and suggesting root causes.

A startup called Zenprise is taking an exciting new approach.  They’ve encoded Microsoft knowledge base articles and other information into their system.  Once a problem is detected, Zenprise explores multiple hypotheses about the cause.  As more data is collected, the system narrows the list of possible causes.

The product enters beta next month, and works with NetIQ and MOM. If it performs more or less as promised, it should be a big help diagnosing and fixing Exchange problems.

Today at the LinuxWorld Summit in New York, Nokia announced its new tablet PC platform, the Nokia 770. It’s a pocket-sized handheld tablet computer, with WiFi and Bluetooth support, running on Linux. Here’s a photo.

There are several things about it that aren’t quite right:

• There’s no cellular modem. It relies on an additional Bluetooth mobile phone.
• Historically, Nokia hasn’t been successful selling devices with no carrier relationship. Nokia operates best when the purchase price of its devices are being subsidised by a phone contract.
• It’s being positioned as a device for the home, but it’s surprisingly small for a home device. It’s not much bigger than a remote control. A home device ought to be bigger, say 10"/25cm diagonal.
• Conversely, it’s not being positioned as a nomadic device. Its size implies that it’s much more suited to being a highly-featured laptop replacement.
• The performance is very poor. The demo devices were extremely slow.

It’s a shame. Much of the industrial design is very compelling. It’s been let down by the execution.

Continue reading ‘Nokia 770 Platform Won’t be Successful’

Blackberries seem to be everywhere these days. They are a clear demonstration that mobile messaging is good for many people, and that RIM leads the market.

It’s disappointing that most of the competitive buzz is on (other) proprietary alternatives. Microsoft is providing Exchange access libraries for use with Symbian, to help drive clients locked into Exchange. There are various solutions using servers that may back-end onto open servers, but do proprietary things to the phone.

This is sad. Fortunately, an open standards alternative is emerging. This is the IETF’s (Internet Engineering Task Force) wonderfully named LEMONADE ("License to Enhanced Mobile Oriented And Diverse Endpoints") working group, set up to propose messaging standard extensions in support of smart phones, set-top boxes, other memory/processor limited devices and bandwidth/latency challenged networks.

Technically, this work can do what is needed. It can give service provider and customer flexibility, and drive down prices.   

At Isode, we’ve been promoting this open standard view. There are more technical details about this in a recent Isode white paper: http://www.isode.com/whitepapers/lemonade-open-standards.html

… Steve Kille

When someone gives you their email address, there’s an expectation about what you’re going to use that email address for. It’s an implied contract, which identifies the types of messages that you’re going to send to that address. By extension, you’re agreeing the types of messages that you’re not going to send.

There’s currently a lot of fuss about a hosted anti-spam company that allegedly mailed its customers’ technical contacts with a marketing message.  When customers sign up with this company, it asks for a "technical contact" to whom it sends email about service outages, trouble-ticket updates, etc.

That’s where the implied contract lies. The technical contact has a clear expectation of the types of messages they’ll receive, and that doesn’t include marketing.

Increasingly, users are fed up with this type of abuse. It’s known as "re-purposing" a list of addresses.

Other References

Other comments on how legitimate direct marketers can get their messages through more reliably, while avoiding being seen as a spammer, can be seen at  [1], [2], [3], [4], [5].

Continue reading ‘Avoid Repurposing If You Don’t Want to be Seen as a Spammer’

Google’s just launched its Desktop Search for Enterprise. See

http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/desktopsearch_for_enterprise.html

for more details. This provides Google-like search through your desktop. Its searches include local Notes databases and Outlook PSTs.

This is a powerful tool. We need utilities like this to dig emails out of our message stores. Accessing past emails by building folder hierarchies is of limited value as message stores grow in size.

Originally diskettes were the main way for malware to get in.

For the last few years, email has been by far the main channel for malware. Due to spyware over the last six months, web sessions are becoming a second, major channel for malware. It’s not yet as bad as email. But it’s getting that way.

A year from now, all IT staff will have, as part of their responsibilities, ensuring that web connections are kept healthy.

With thanks to Trend Micro’s John Maddison for raising the point

In June, AOL will offer a free webmail service. This has a good chance of becoming one of the leading free email services, competing with such offerings as Hotmail and Yahoo.

Key differentiation points include:

• Spam protection. AOL believes its spam protection is better than its competitors, due to personal whitelisting and blacklisting, and filters which adapt to the individual user
• Users have up to 2GB storage
• Built in search, that searches not just headers but also content
• Rich web client functionality. Eg, drag and drop messages; message unsend; check status of messages within the network (eg whether the message has been read)
• Mailbox is accessible by any IMAP client (POP not supported)
• AIM integration. Eg, the AIM screen name is the left hand side of the email address (eg, if my AIM handle is fred, my email address is fred@aim.com); when you use the AIM client you are automatically logged into email; when in email, AIM presence information is automatically shown.

The free email service will make money by selling advertising space. It’ll also generate revenues by feeding people to AOL’s main portal and its advertising.

The service is current in beta. More information at

http://www.aim.com/get_aim/win/win_beta.adp?aolp=

.