Welp, today finally came…today as in the release date of the Blackberry Storm. I picked one up this morning at 0′dark 30AM. I was first in line and frooze my rear off in doing so, but it was worth it. So far I’m pleasantly surprised, it’s better than my expectations and I really like it. I also got a AT&T BB Bold this week at work and it’s definitely a sweet device. I can pound out emails like usual on it while the Storm’s SurePress will take some getting used to. Both devices have beautiful displays, top notch for mobile devices…and arguably the best of any smartphones.
I’m going to need a few days to get used to the Storm’s SurePress technology. I’ll report back after!
>rent a car bulgariarrow morning is the big day. T-Mobile will be office announcing the first Android base Smartphone. I’ve been waiting for the gOS for quite sometime as it could rip me away from my precious personal blackberry.
Stay tuned for tomorrows unvieling of the HTC Dream aka Tmobile G1. There is also rumor that T-mobile might be offering *FREE* gmail messaging service with the phone… compared to Blackberry where you’d need to have the Blackberry Internet Service plan.
Looks like we have an official, albeit not surprising, model numbering for the upcoming Blackberry Touchscreen device exclusively on Verizon Wireless in the US. While I’m looking forward to the device, I’m hesitant about how well it will work as a blackberry. I went on a Mobile Phone playing binge this past weekend and I’m even more picky about touchscreens than before.
I know….I’m the minority here, I wasn’t one of the Technophobes stiff in the pants for the new iPhone 3G / iPhone 2.0 Firmware release today. Though, I’m a Messaging Administrator at a sizeable Fortune 500 International company and I know that I need understand the implications, administration, and maintenance if the iPhone were to be approved for corporate use in my environment. I love Blackberry’s and the recent iteration of Windows Mobile has grown on me.
I should start with, we are a Blackberry shop. I have approximately 1,500 BB’s deployed across my 7 BES servers globally. We currently do not have Exchange’s ActiveSync technology in use, however I ran an eval about a year and a half ago along with one of our Security Analysts and the conclusion was that the technology + devices tested did not meet our security and stability requirements. My recommendation was to wait and see what the upgrade to Exchange 2007 SP1 brought in terms of policy and the Windows Mobile 6 update did. Fast forward to today, July 11th and the release of the iPhone with Exchange ActiveSync support. What does this bring us in comparison to the Windows Mobile devices out there? How will it meet security requirements? How well does it play with the Exchange ActiveSync policies? Blackberry Killer - NO, Best Enterprise Phone _ NO.
Well..well…well… I will say “not very well at all” to any of them. Ooh, ah, oh, I can hear the Apple fanboi’s going crazy right now. Have you been able to activate that shiny new $300 brick yet? No, iTunes is still down? Apple didn’t learn from their mistakes of last year… and decided to rollout 3 new products at once. Ouch. Ok sorry, that was a low blow, I’m focusing on Enterprise use here. Back on topic.
There’s a nice little Enterprise Deployment Guide PDF found here.
Reading through this guy I found some features “left out” of Apple’s Exchange support – in the nice section titled “Exchange ActiveSync Features Not Supported”
Folder Management – hrm, so I can’t select which folders to sync? I can’t move items between folders?
Opening links in email to documents stored on Sharepoint servers – not much of a complaint here.
Task Synchronization – Why not? Most Road warriors I know manage their tasks on their mobile devices.
Setting an “Out of office” autoreply message – I won’t even acknowledge this one, because this is just stupidity.
Creating meeting invitations – why not? This seems like a basic function for any mobile user. To me this is just plain silliness.
Flagging messages for follow-up – I wish my Blackberry’s did this, but they don’t. However, Windows Mobile 6.x in conjunction with Exchange server 2007 does.
Remote Wipe is supported and had to be, though I’m curious how this will look once more iPhones get rolled out. Since you’re talking 4-16GB worth of storage, what happens when a user wipe’s their device and all their media – whether it be legal or not, is wiped by the administrators. Some think that hey, I have it on my computer, but possibly not when you’re talking about movies/video that can consume several GB’s on your PC. It could pose an interesting future of how the iPhone will be used in the Enterprise.
I’m out for the weekend, more iPhone spanking next week.
We signed Hossa, we should have signed him at the trade deadline but we have him now. Should solidify our scoring for the next season and bring ‘another’ power forward/strong 2 way player to the team.
GO WINGS!
Also here is a cool site that a coworker showed me today.
Welp, Hyper-V finally RTM’d today and it’s up on Microsoft’s download site.Check it out!
The Exchange Team is promising official guidance within 60 days, I will patiently await, though it won’t change the direction we are currently moving in.
This came across on one of my Mailing lists last week. Freakin funny, if you’re a geek or enjoy corporate life.
BEST OoO AUTOMATIC E-MAIL REPLIES
1. I am currently out of the office at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. Please be prepared for my mood.
2. You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn’t have received anything at all.
3. Sorry to have missed you, but I’m at the doctor’s having my brain and heart removed so I can be promoted to our management team.
4. I will be unable to delete all the e-mails you send me until I return from vacation. Please be patient, and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received.
5. Thank you for your e-mail. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first 10 words and $1.99 for each additional word in your message.
6. The e-mail server is unable to verify your server connection. Your message has not been delivered. Please restart your computer and try sending again. (The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see who did this over and over and over….)
7. Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.
8. Hi, I’m thinking about what you’ve just sent me. Please wait by your PC for my response.
9. I’ve run away to join a different circus.
10. I will be out of the office for the next two weeks for medical reasons. When I return, please refer to me as Lucille instead of Steve.
Disclaimer: I’m a Microsoft Exchange Administrator, some of this can apply to other messaging environments but most is specific to Exchange installations.
So I decided to write a little article about Email Archiving since it’s a subject that has been very near and dear to my heart for the last, oh, almost 2 years. I’ve gone through a grueling time trying to get a particular product up in going with the help of Professional Services and it was decided that the product simply wouldn’t work in our environment and the project was scrapped after almost 10 months. Might I had that the product was selected without proper evaluation and research. Continuing, I had already began researching vendors before scrapping the current project, reading reviews, ignoring Gartner’s magic quadrant, reading more reviews, looking at whitepapers, online documentation and I came up with a list of 8 in-house solutions and two outsourced solutions. During the subsequent months, we cut the outsourced solutions and 4 of the in-house solutions. After which we began an evaluation of the 4 vendors, 3 of which were Software solutions based on MS SQL and some sort of Application server, the 4th was a hardware based(you want to think appliance, but it isn’t per se one) solution. Each product had their strengths and weaknesses…. more later on.
Anyways, the reason: I’ve watched threads on various forums and mailing lists go by asking about Email Archiving platforms out there and it appears Admins don’t really understand their requirements which determines which solutions they should evaluate/select. For example, a Messaging team working at a privately held company in healthcare industry could have very different reasons for archiving email than say a messaging team working for a publicly traded patent holding technology company.
So you might be asking yourself, like what reason?
Regulations – Thanks Enron and Identity Theft
Do I have to follow some sort of regulatory guidance? HIPAA, SOX, etc
Do I have legal requirements? “We shred email after 1 year”
Are we constantly going to litigation?
Do we outsource the eDiscovery process and analysis?
Do I have document retention requirements? i.e. Must keep contracts for 3 years, PO’s for 7 Years, etc.
Do I have international locations that are bound to strict privacy acts? EU…
Do I need to be able to perform discovery searches against the entire archive data set?
These would be what I refer to as compliance requirements.
Technical – Can I improve performance?
Do I have messaging database bloat? You know the user type, the one that saves EVERYTHING including the “There is left over sandwiches in the break room, come get it!”. These users often cause your mailbox database to grow and grow. Hopefully you’re shaking your head and saying “This is why we have quota’s in place!”.
Is my messaging environment distributed? Mailbox servers located in various offices connected via some sort of WAN, MPLS, or VPN link.
Do I need to archive more than just email? Files, SharePoint, SQL, LCS, or OCS…and do I need to search from a single interface
Are PST’s out of control, and perhaps against Policy?
If bound by a compliance requirement, which generally requires Exchange Journaling to be enabled, can my Exchange server’s handle the additional load that journaling produces?
These would be what I call Mailbox and Data Management requirements.
Political – Who is this going to piss off?
Are we open to outsourcing this solution? Are we worried about our data residing on systems outside our control?
Do I want users to know their data is being archived?
Do I want users pulling their data directly from the Archive repositories?
Do I want to prevent users from creating and using PST’s to save data outside our retention requirements?
These would be what I call, the “Walking on Egg Shells” requirements.
As you can see there are several factors to define your requirements.
