Today, very few people access email on their cellphones. And for those that do, there’s often a choice of client software you can use.

It’s too much effort to download and configure this software. As a mass market emerges for cellphone-based email, most people will use software built into the phone, provided by vendors such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola. The service provider will do the provisioning, almost transparently.

… David Ferris, with thanks to Critical Path’s Mike Serbinis

I was working with my email the other day, using my favorite email and calendar product, and I received an email invitation to a meeting. When I opened the email, my application "recognized" it as a calendar invite, and gave me the opportunity to accept, decline, delegate or recommend another date.  Sounds simple, right?

Except for the fact that the invite came from a web-based Meeting service. When I spoke to the person who had "invited" me to this meeting, I found out they, in turn, had used a completely different email and calendar package than mine.  It’s pleasing to realize that this represents real interoperability. The calendar event used all three calendar specifications--iCalendar to describe the calendar objects, iMIP to send me the invitation by email, and iTIP to give me the opportunity to accept and decline the event. Three different vendors touched this calendar object and it still managed to arrive in my inbox in a proper format so that my calendar application readily accepted and understood the object.

To me, someone who has been waiting for just this sort of a interoperability since 1989, it was an exciting day. Hopefully it bodes well for the future interoperability.

… Pat Egen

Early teamspace products often had rich clients. But it’s clear that’s wrong. They must be web browsers.

You want to be able to set up teamspaces at will. Often, you’ll want to do this with people that aren’t members of your organization. You won’t be able to make many assumptions about the workstations they’re using. Hence web browsers are the natural client.

And it’s always better to do things the natural way.

… David Ferris

There’s a growing convergence between scanning for email malware, and scanning for web and instant messaging malware. Eg, you need to scan both for virus-infected file transfers, spyware downloads, and traffic that has inappropriate content.

Clearly, a lot of the technology that applies to the one channel, should apply to the other channel. And you’d like to have a common administration and control tools.

Not so simple. One very big difference is that while a five second scanning delay doesn’t matter for email, it matters a whole lot for web and instant messaging scanning. Web and IM scanning, and policy control, has to be done extremely quickly.

… David Ferris, with thanks to ScanSafe’s Roy Tuvey

There are a growing number of products that scan electronic communications (especially email), to enforce compliance with laws, industry regulations, or organization policy.

The first one to get well established was MIMEsweeper. Other more recent players include MessageGate, ProofPoint, Tumbleweed, and Vontu.

Vendors always talk breezily about the policy definition. However, the really difficult thing is translating policies in your HR manuals, or laws or regulations, into equivalent filters. If the filter uses simple word pattern matching, you’ll soon be in trouble. There’s no way a simple parser can capture what’s meant be "private health care information about customers".

So when evaluating policy enforcement products, spend much of your time evaluating how well policies/regulations/laws can be embodied in filters. In other words, on the analysis side of the equation.

The other side of the equation is the action part: what happens if a policy trigger is fired. Typical actions include notifying an administrator, putting an email in quarantine, sending a message back to the sender, and so on. The action side is much simpler than the analysis side.

… David Ferris

Directories were once viewed as a potentially general-purpose IT building block. In practice, they have never been used in this way. There are a variety of reasons for this.

• Directory vendors didn’t make directories either available or easily usable for this purpose. For example, Microsoft’s Active Directory until relatively recently (see Active Directory Application Mode - ADAM) was too tightly integrated with Windows security to be employed as an IT building block.
• Existing and ubiquitous relational database management systems provided alternative IT building blocks, albeit it ones without standardized schemas, or protocol-level interfaces. While these were easy to create, this approach has led to information both duplicated and scattered across many often incompatible database tables.
• As organizations now drive towards maintaining single logical repositories of multi-application data, they are employing Web Services (WS) as opposed to directory protocols such as LDAP, as protocol-level building blocks.

… Nick Shelness

It’s cheaper to provide live chat on your website than phone and email support. The average cost of a chat is around $1.50/chat. It’s about $2.50 for an email, and $6 to $8 for a phone call.

Live chats are cheaper because:

• On average an operator can respond to 5 chats at a time. With email and phone, they can only do one at a time.
• As with email, a lot of responses are scripted
• Chat can be handled offshore well by people that understand English yet may have foreign and hard-to-understand accents. Such staff can be in developing countries, with low labor costs

… David Ferris, with thanks to InQ’s Bernard Louvat

We recently came across ScanSafe (http://www.scansafe.net/scansafe/index.html). This is a hosted service that scans web traffic for malware. The main services are:

• Virus control
• Content filtering. Eg, allows administrators to limit access to gambling and porno websites
• Spyware detection and control

It’s the first such hosted service we’ve come across. Hosted email malware services (eg, MessageLabs, Postini, Frontbridge, MXLogic) have become popular, and are growing quickly. By the same logic, you’d expect hosted web scanning services like ScanSafe to do well. Expect to see more such offerings.

… David Ferris

Any day now, Microsoft is expected to release a preview of Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2003. While officially called a Community Technology Preview (CTP), it is really a Beta and should be treated as such. Do not install this into a production environment! If you are one who may fine the temptation too great, please note that there is NO official support and comments will be directed towards newsgroups. Consider yourselves warned.

So why the early release?

Customers and Partners get a chance to look at the new features and plan for when and how to leverage the new capabilities. Perhaps Microsoft also wants to show momentum for SenderID and their upcoming mobility enhancements, though the new devices do not exist yet outside of the manufacturers and developers, and an additional mobility pack is not due until later in the year to enable that. I suspect Microsoft and vendors would like to test those products on the big Internet before their official release later this year.

In addition to the rollup and integrated testing of multiple hotfixes released since SP1 in June 2004, there are some significant feature enhancements and additions. Features as Microsoft announced a couple of months ago are significant.

Mobile E-Mail Improvements

• New seamless Direct Push Technology e-mail experience
• Additional data compression
• Additional Outlook properties over the air
• Greater control and security for mobile devices including local and remote device wipe
• Certificate-based authentication
• S/MIME on mobile devices

Spam Protection and Other Features

• Updated Intelligent Message Filter (IMF)
• SenderID Support in Exchange Server
• Standard Edition Database Size to 75GB**
• Performance Enhancements to Offline Address Book
• Optional Cache Mode Enforcement
• Finer Replication Tuning for Public Folders
• Official Support for GroupWise 6.x Connectors
• More Languages Supported in Outlook Web Access (OWA)

**Before you get too excited about that huge store, think about how long it will take to backup and restore something that size.

… Lee Benjamin