Software Upgrade Revenue Motivates Microsoft’s Managed Service Offerings

SNMP: An Important Part of Managing Large Messaging Systems

Microsoft recently announced Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) Version 3.5. Key new features:

• Mobile, push messaging support.
• Easier deployment by service providers.

Many service providers would like to offer a hosted version of Exchange and Microsoft’s other collaboration tools. That bodes well for HMC.

What bothers us about HMC is this:

• Its core is Exchange Server, SharePoint, and Live Communications Server. It uses the standard off-the-shelf code.
• Service providers need special capabilities, such as the ability for end customers to provision their own users, high scalability (millions of users per logical server), and integration with the service provider’s billing and provisioning systems.
• In our experience, such facilities have to be considered, and built into, the architecture of a product. In the case of HMC, Microsoft is gradually trying to add such features onto products that weren’t designed for service providers.

It would be a good thing for SMEs if HMC were successful. And it may be true that no telco staff has ever been fired for buying Microsoft, at least for the last 10 years.

Nevertheless, those evaluating the software would do well to exercise caution. Microsoft’s last messaging offering for service providers went the way of all flesh, rather prematurely.

… David Ferris

Outsourcing Often Delays Software Upgrades

Gmail Mobile: Disadvantages of Web Mobile Messaging

Waterford Technologies is not a household name, not even in email households. It’ll get better known. It has an attractive email archiving product, MailMeter:

• Highly interactive, lots of drill-downs with fast responses
• Easy to use and intuitive
• Easy to install

A self-funded company, Waterford Technologies is growing organically, around 100% annually. The company’s main target is SMEs, up to 5,000 mailboxes.

Overall sense: Today’s email archiving leaders such as Symantec/KVS and EMC/Legato are first-generation products. MailMeter is a second generation product, built on a more modern, better architecture.

… David Ferris

Spam Quarantines Should Be Sorted by Score

CalDAV: Promising New Calendaring Interoperability Standards

Rockliffe sells Windows-based POP/IMAP email server software to businesses and service providers. Version 7 of its MailSite server is now available. Among other things, it provides interesting support for mobile devices.

It’s interesting because it’s simple to install and support, and overall has extremely low total cost of ownership. In a nutshell:

• Email notifications are pushed out by SMS message.
• The first few lines of each email are included.
• Users define their preferences--e.g., which emails should generate these SMS alerts--via a simple Web page.

This approach has its limits. You can’t view attachments, many messages are truncated, and there’s no ability to reply to an SMS message. To reply, you have to go to an email client, either mobile-, Web-, or PC-based. Nevertheless, it’s useful for a wide variety of short emails. For example, if a field engineer needs to call a client, it’s very quick and easy to send a short email, like "Call Fred at XYZ Inc., on 415 986 1414 at 10am". For more details, see the press release.

It’s a nice example of how to do push mobile email without a lot of fuss.

… David Ferris

IMAP is the Open Standard for Mobile Email

Lost Mobile Devices a Major Issue

We attended the November joint meeting of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and the OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) on mobile messaging. While these two groups have rather different cultures, both are working to build an open standards approach to mobile messaging. The IETF people primarily focus on getting things right technically. The OMA has strong business concerns and a desire for timely and stable specification.

Both groups have (different) architectures for mobile email. The IETF applies its standard client/server architecture, and then works to fine-tune protocols. The OMA introduces a “Mobile Email Enabler” (MEE) that sits between the mobile device and the email server, and then seeks to select protocols for use between the mobile device and MEE.

Aligning models is important for the open standards world. Here’s our take on what should be done:

• The OMA should recognize that in some situations the IETF model is valid, and that mobile devices can talk directly to email servers.
• The IETF should recognize the MEE as a useful approach and include it as an option in the architecture.

For more details, see Isode’s white paper.

… Steve Kille

This is a revised version of the bulletin we published on December 19, 2005. We’ve reissued the bulletin to clarify our comments about large folders and correct our comments about showing resource availability.

We recently got a demo of the new version of Outlook Web Access (OWA) being prepared for the Exchange 12 release. We saw a build slightly newer than the version being shipped to a select handful of pre-beta testers in Microsoft’s "technical preview program."

The best new features are:

• Unified messaging is supported.
• When addressing a new message, a best guess is displayed as you type. This "typedown" functionality is nothing new to users of conventional clients, such as Outlook, but it is new to OWA12. It’s based on the most recently used addresses, rather than GAL lookup.
• When choosing a time for a meeting, the interface for suggesting times is now much clearer and easier, and echoes improvements made in Outlook 12.
• The meeting attendee picker has been enhanced to separate out resources, such as meeting rooms. It makes it easier to choose a room or other resource, based on its location and availability.

Further enhancements we’d like to see are:

• When looking at a folder containing more than 50 messages, the view is split into separate pages. It would be better if OWA showed a continuously scrollable, virtual viewport onto a large list. Outlook and other Ajax Web clients such as Scalix Web Access and Yahoo Mail can do this with good performance, by loading just enough of the list to display and then preloading the next items in the background.
• OWA12 displays inside an unmodified Internet Explorer window. In other words, it doesn’t disable IE’s toolbars, menus, address bar, etc. This can be confusing and distracting for newer or occasional OWA users. Again, other Ajax clients hide these elements, and even display their own menu bar. The behavior could be made configurable so that power users can reenable IE’s decoration, but it would be better if these elements were hidden by default.

… Richi Jennings

Interesting New IM Browser Clients