6.6 Exchange Mobile Services

 < Day Day Up > 



Exchange Mobile Services, a new feature of Exchange 2003, aims to make mobility a core part of Exchange by allowing people with Pocket PCs, smartphones, and other handheld devices to access Exchange resources, such as their Inboxes, contacts, and calendars. Mobile Services supports two ways to connect devices: always on (Outlook Mobile Access, or OMA) and synchronization, based on Microsoft's ActiveSync technology. As we will see later on, you can also use a desktop version of ActiveSync to connect a Pocket PC to your mailbox and synchronize mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks using a desktop cradle. In a more general sense, the network capability of a specific device and the software that runs on the device determines which mode is more appropriate to establish a mobile connection to Exchange.

Exchange 2003 integrates Mobile Services directly into the server. There are three basic components. First, a new global setting controls how the organization supports mobility (Figure 6.10), and it is here that you decide whether you support Exchange ActiveSync (synchronization), browser access through Outlook Mobile Access (OMA), or both modes.

click to expand
Figure 6.10: Global settings for Mobile Services.

The ability of Exchange to send notifications to mobile devices via SMTP really depends on whether the target cell phone carriers support such notifications. Many European carriers allow users to send SMTP messages to GSM/ GPRS phones, typically using SMTP addresses of the form: Mobile-phonenumber@provider-smtp-address-for example, 0868246057@sfr.fr.

Some carriers can accept the notifications generated by Exchange Mobile Services and interpret the number of the mobile device to deliver the notification to from data held inside the message. Others require you to use MSN notification services as a bridge. In this context, MSN takes a message from Exchange and transforms it into the form required by the carrier. MSN might strip out forwarding headers, remove white space, and compress the data to make it easier for the carrier to process. Still other carriers accept new message notifications via SMS but expect you to use a WAP connection to read the content, possibly by connecting to a special phone number that incurs additional charges. As you can see, this area is full of different implementations, so you need to contact your own carrier to work out how it supports notifications and how you connect Exchange Mobile Services to its notification mechanism.

You can also decide whether you want to limit OMA to the set of devices that Microsoft fully supports or allow users to connect an unsupported browser, such as Opera or even IE6 running on a desktop PC. Extensions to the AD schema allow you to control settings for individual users, as shown in Figure 6.11. Finally, two new Web applications run under the control of IIS to allow users to synchronize with ActiveSync or run OMA browser sessions. Figure 6.12 shows the properties of the OMA Web application as viewed from the IIS manager console. As you can see, it looks very similar to the properties of the standard "Exchange" Web application for OWA.

click to expand
Figure 6.11: Controlling OMA access.

click to expand
Figure 6.12: Properties of the OMA Web application.

For Pocket PCs, Microsoft also supports synchronization through a server-based version of ActiveSync running with Microsoft Mobile Infor- mation Server (MMIS) 2002, which you can use with Exchange 2000.[4] However, it is much easier to support mobile devices with Exchange 2003, because you can use the Mobile Services functionality integrated into the server (e.g., you have to install a separate set of schema extensions for MMIS, whereas the Exchange 2003 installation procedure installs the mobility schema updates along with its other extensions).

It is important not to confuse OMA with OMM (Outlook Mobile Manager), a client-side add-on to Outlook 2002 that creates a partnership between Outlook and a mobile device. In this scenario, the OMM module processes incoming messages and decides whether to forward them on to the mobile device. If it forwards a message, OMM also strips it of white space to make the message as small as possible. You can certainly use OMM, but its long-term future is uncertain and you have to deploy it client by client. With this in mind, Exchange Mobile Services seem like a better foundation to serve mobile devices.

Microsoft upgraded the MMIS feature set to create Mobile Services for Exchange 2003. The new features include:

  • Support for data transfer to smartphones using XHTML, HTML, cHTML, or WML over WAP 2.0 or iMode connections. This range of protocols means that Microsoft can support a variety of smart- phones globally. Given the nature of the cell phone market, and the amount of new models introduced to the market, it is impossible to provide an up-to-date list of supported phones here. Check with Microsoft for the latest information. Table 6.1 lists some of the phones supported at DU (Device Update) 2 release. Expect new DU releases every six months or so.

    Table 6.1: Supported Models for Initial Release of OMA

    Manufacturer

    Model

    Browser

    Rendering

    Network

    Sony-Ericsson

    T68i

    AU R201A, R301A

    xHTML

    GSM

    All

    X503is

    Compact Netfront 2.0 by Access

    cHTML

    iMode

    All

    X504i

    Compact Netfront 2.0 by Access

    cHTML

    iMode

    Microsoft

    All

    PIE 3.02

    HTML

    All

    Toshiba

    J-T51

    J-Phone 4.x

    xHTML

    J-Phone

    Sharp

    J-SH51

    J-Phone 4.x

    xHTML

    J-Phone

    Casio

    A3012CA

    -

    xHTML

    KDDI

    Sanyo

    A3011SA

    -

    xHTML

    KDDI

    Toshiba

    C5001T

    -

    xHTML

    KDDI

    Sony-Ericsson

    P800

    All

    xHTML

    GSM

    Sony-Ericsson

    T68i

    All

    xHTML

    GSM

    Microsoft

    All

    PIE 4.01

    HTML

    All

  • Support for continuous updating of Pocket PC and smartphone clients by notifying devices when new messages, contacts, or calendar data arrives at an Exchange 2003 server.

  • Improvements in the way that clients negotiate with the server to establish credentials and determine the client's capabilities (a smart- phone is different from a Pocket PC).

  • General improvements in efficiency of folder synchronization between Exchange and wireless devices to optimize the use of network bandwidth-something that is very important for wireless networks, especially given the amount of data some users want to move to and from their mailboxes!

6.6.1 Exchange ActiveSync

ActiveSync is the synchronization process that transfers mailbox and calendar data from Exchange to handheld devices through Microsoft's Active- Sync protocol, including Pocket PC or other devices that run variants of Windows CE, like phones that run Pocket PC Phone Edition or the new smartphones that run Microsoft Windows CE for Smartphone 2002. You work with messages and other information held in local storage on the device and then connect to Exchange whenever you want to send or retrieve data or when the server informs you that it has new information for you, like new mail. This mode of working requires the device to have the capability of processing information offline and the ability to accept incoming notifications from the server. Synchronization can also occur through a PC- Pocket PC "partnership" where the PC (desktop or laptop) acts as a conduit for the Pocket PC to access Exchange data. We will cover this type of connection later on in this chapter.

Exchange 2003 includes the ActiveSync server, an application that runs as managed code under ASP .NET, as part of Exchange Mobile Services. You can use two distinct synchronization modes:

  • Traditional or explicit synchronization: you connect the PDA or other ActiveSync client (including smartphones) to Exchange and the device synchronizes its local data with your mailbox. For example, the device uploads messages for Exchange to send and downloads messages waiting in the inbox. In this mode, you typically use a cradle (usually a device connected via USB to connect the PDA to the network and other resources via an intermediate PC) or a wireless link. Unless it is a slow GSM/GPRS connection, a wireless link is usually faster than a cradle when synchronizing, but you may not notice the difference unless you have many messages and other data to download.

  • Notification-driven or implicit synchronization (sometimes called Always Up to Date, or AUTD): the smartphone receives a notification that the Exchange server has new content and connects to download the content, or makes a connection to upload new data. The connection is over a network such as GPRS, while notifications usually originate as SMTP messages sent to the network carrier for delivery to the phone as SMS messages.

As noted earlier, Microsoft introduced server-mode ActiveSync support for clients in Microsoft Mobile Information Manager, so this is tried and tested functionality. The major differences are that Microsoft has now integrated mobility as a key part of Exchange and that Exchange 2003 supports notification-driven synchronization.

Smartphones generate a lot of attention because they integrate the ubiquitous connectivity of the cell phone with versions of Office applications. A battle exists between Microsoft's platforms and the Symbian OS, supported by many phone manufacturers such as Nokia. Over time, the capabilities of the different platforms will probably merge and you will be able to connect to Exchange as easily with one as you can with the other. For now, Microsoft's own platforms have the edge because they come with out-of-the-box compatibility. Once you decide that you want a phone that runs a Microsoft OS, you then have to make a choice between a Pocket PC with phone capability and a smartphone that supports some of the features of the Pocket PC. The T-Mobile-branded phone running Pocket PC Phone Edition 2002 (Figure 6.13) is a good example of the first category, while the Orange SPV smart- phone is the first production example of Microsoft's smartphone platform, with Motorola and Samsung the second set of companies to produce smart- phones. Obviously, Microsoft is keen for other companies to produce similar smartphones and you can expect other versions to appear, especially in North America, in the future.


Figure 6.13: The Smartphone interface

Both platforms synchronize with Exchange via ActiveSync for email, contacts, and calendar information. Both support server-mode and cradle- mode ActiveSync, so you do not have to deploy server-mode ActiveSync if you only need to deploy a few units. Different aspects of the platforms attract. For example, if you are accustomed to use cell phones to send SMS messages, you will probably enjoy the ability to work with Pocket Outlook on a smartphone because smartphones have the same T-9 predictive text entry mode to help users compose messages. On the other hand, if you want to work with Word or Excel documents, you need a Pocket PC platform because the smartphone does not currently support these document types. The larger screen size of Pocket PC-based devices is more suitable if you need to read more than a page or so from messages or documents and a bigger screen makes it easier to navigate through a large inbox. Both platforms include versions of Pocket Explorer, so you can access the web, albeit slowly sometimes. Both include VPN capability too, so you can access resources within your internal network if you add the necessary certificates to the device's certificate store.

6.6.2 Outlook Mobile Access

Outlook Mobile Access enables real-time, bandwidth-constrained, browser- based connections for devices such as the latest generation of smartphones. Unlike synchronization, these connections are "always on" and are similar to the connection that you would use with a WAP browser on a cell phone. For OMA, a smartphone is something like a Sony-Ericsson T68i, which is capable of connecting to Exchange using a supported microbrowser that can render mailbox and calendar contents. The T68i uses xHTML to render data that it fetches with a GSM connection. Microsoft's own smart- phones also connect with GSM and use HTML to display information via a version of Pocket Information Explorer. The Japanese iMode cell phones also support OMA now, and you can expect to see many more phones with this capability in the future. As with any other piece of functionality, once one manufacturer supports a feature such as games or WAP, the other manufacturers respond to the competitive advantage, and, over time, the feature becomes a standard part of all cell phones.

You do not have to support OMA on every Exchange 2003 server, and you may decide that you do not want to because users have quite enough opportunities to access email without using their phones. If you do go ahead and implement OMA, it is good to know that you can verify that OMA is functioning from any desktop that runs IE. This method is useful if you are having difficulty connecting a smartphone and want to make sure that Exchange is functioning correctly. To do this, proceed as follows:

  • Navigate to http://exchange-server-name/oma.

  • Enter your logon credentials for a mailbox that exists on the server that you can access.

  • Click on the OK hyperlink when you receive a warning that your device (such as IE6) is not supported.

  • Access OMA. You should see a display similar to that shown in Figure 6.14.

    click to expand
    Figure 6.14: OMA running on IE6.

If you compare the view of the mailbox provided by OMA in Figure 6.14 with the view that you expect through OWA, it is obvious that much of the data you would normally see is missing. This is by design and demonstrates the "fit for function" mode that OMA implements to deal with the bandwidth and screen estate challenges set by cell phones. Even in its reach client, OWA expects to use a reasonable network connection back to the server. OMA makes no such assumptions, because the link could be something like a relatively puny 9.6-Kbps GSM dial-up connection from a modem connected to a cell phone. Therefore, OMA strips out any unnecessary text or graphics and provides a minimum folder list to reduce the data that the server must transmit to the client. In addition, many OMA clients will have limited screen estate (think of the standard screen on a cell phone), so the target platform is a 320 × 320 screen rather than the 640 × 480 base minimum provided by any PC.

No one pretends that you are going to enjoy processing a large Inbox through OMA. Given the small screen, lack of keyboard, and stripped- down data, it is unlikely that you will be able to deal with hundreds of messages, but that is not the intention. Think of OMA as a way to triage new messages as they arrive in your Inbox, to be able to identify the messages that you need to respond to immediately and those that you can ignore (or better still, delete without reading). In terms of responses, you will not compose a long reply, but you can certainly forward a note to someone else for his or her action or reply briefly using terms such as "OK," "No," "For action," and so on. Because OMA provides only a limited view of your folder list, you are not able to work with most of your mailbox, and, indeed, you cannot move messages from the Inbox to another folder.

Because they are relatively new, smartphones may receive the majority of attention for OMA. However, OMA is not just for smartphones, and devices such as Pocket PCs can benefit greatly from the mobile synchronization capabilities now built into Exchange 2003. Unfortunately, because OMA uses Microsoft's own AirSync standard for synchronization instead of the more common and more popular SyncML protocol, mobile devices that do not run the Pocket PC O/S have to be upgraded to support AirSync before they can benefit from OMA.

[4] . Because its functionality is now incorporated into Exchange 2003, Microsoft is phasing out MMIS, so the best plan is to install an Exchange 2003 server and run OMA on it if you want to support large populations of Pocket PCs.



 < Day Day Up > 



Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Administrators Pocket Consultant
ISBN: 0735619786
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 188

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net