Chris Leckness

From the conception of WM5, Microsoft was thinking about taking the PIM beyond the traditional approach, which has been using a mail server sending email to an email client such Outlook. Outlook uses standard POP3 or IMAP4 protocols. User also maintains its Calendar entries, Contacts, Tasks, etc. locally on the Outlook client.

The same concept extends to the PDA, where PIM information (Email, Contacts, Calendar entries can be synchronized between the PDA and Outlook for portability but the PDA still needs to be tethered to the PC for information synchronization.

With the latest crop of wireless capable handheld devices. User can basically connect over the Internet wirelessly (CDMA, ED-VO, GSM, Edge, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.) to get email and in general wireless carrier offers some capabilities to send/receive email (semi-automatically by using SMS to trigger the sync process)

The convergeance devices have the capabillity to be always on due to theire voice cellular requirements, the need of having email to be pushed or pulled automatically has become very popular especially with device such RIM Blackberry

Microsoft recently offers this capability with their Exchange 2003 SP2 server. If the handheld device is upgraded to SKU2 level then the mail server can connect directly to the Windows Mobile Devices in real time using a heart beat mechanism (for cellular capable devices). This real time syncronization not only works for email but PIM information as well.

When you start using this capability then you will realize that you have less need Outlook on the PC to keep the information up to date, especially when you are on the road. Not talking about the collaboration benefits as well. Any calendar, contact, email can be sync'ed at real time to a central Exchange server and can be shared with your collaborators in real time in that situation, The Outlook client can become just a front end to view and to manage the PIM information reside on the Exchange server (MAPI protocol) or optionally the PIM information can be cached to the local PC for offline use.

Until now, Exchange server was reserved to corporate users, due to the complexity and cost to maintain such infrastructure.

For personal users, thanksfully there are few Exchange Service Hosting such 4smartphone.com, Mail2Web.com that offer very affordable monthly service subscription (in general from 0$ to less than $10). The thread here can explain aan easy way to start using this concept....

Ironically, One of a hack to improve performance on a WM5 has been to create a "fake" Exchange Server with AcitveSync just to stop ActiveSync from waking up avery 5 minutes (ActiveSync thinks you are using a smartphone device) to sync with an Exchange server.

So when you want to use the real Exchange server sync'ing then there is no need to fake this server anymore...Just use it. However, I think the sync interval still need to set at manual to avoid some other issues such CF disappearing...

Written by Solsie. Check out this thread.

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Chris Leckness, Microsoft MVP Windows Mobile

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