Tag: Mobile

The business case for Exchange 2007 – part IV

Posted on by ewand

Another installment in a series of posts outlining the case for going to Exchange 2007. Previous articles can be found here.

GOAL: Make flexible working easier

“Flexible Working” might mean different things to differing organisations – some might think of mobile staff who turn up at any office with a laptop, sit at any free desk and start working – others might imagine groups of workers who can work from home part- or even full-time. Whatever your definition is, there’s no doubt that the technology which can enable these scenarios has evolved in great strides in recent years.

RPC Over HTTP – magic technology, even if the name isn’t

The “Wave 2003” of Exchange Server 2003/Outlook 2003/Windows XP SP2/Windows Server 2003 brought to the fore a technology which wasn’t really new, but needed the coordination of server OS, server application, client OS and client applications to make it available: if you’ve been using or deploying RPC/HTTP, you’ll know exactly what it does and why it’s cool. If you haven’t deployed it, the name might mean nothing to you… in short, the way in which Outlook talks to Exchange Server when you’re on the internal network, can be wrapped up within a secure channel that is more friendly to firewalls – hence “tunneling” that protocol (RPC) inside a stream of data which your firewall can receive (HTTP, or more correctly, HTTPS).

What this means in practice is that your users can connect in to your environment using a widely-supported network mechanism (ie HTTPS), and without requiring a Virtual Private Network connection to be established in the first place. This manifests itself in the fact that as soon as a user’s PC finds a connection to the internet, Outlook will attempt to connect to your network using HTTPS, and if it succeeds, will become “online” with Exchange and (if they’re using the default “cached mode” of Outlook) will synchronise changes between Outlook and Exchange since the client was last online.

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A sometimes overlooked benefit of using regular internet protocols to connect the client & servers together, is that the communication will be able to leave one protected network, traverse the unprotected internet within a secure channel, then enter a second protected network. This means that (for example) your users could be connected to a customer or partner’s own internal network, but be able to go through that network’s firewall to reach your Exchange server. If you required a VPN to be established to connect Outlook and Exchange, then it almost certainly won’t be possible to use a protected network as your starting point, since the owners of that network will not allow the outbound connections that VPN clients use, but will allow outbound connections on HTTPS.

Now, RPC/HTTP was part of Outlook and Exchange 2003, however it’s been improved in Exchange 2007 and is easier to get up and running. If you’re also using Outlook 2007, the client configuration is a whole lot simpler – even if it’s the first time a user has ever connected to Exchange, all they may need to know is their email address and password, and Outlook will be able to find the Exchange server and configure itself using whatever default you’ve set. The technology behind the ease of configuration is called the Autodiscover Service, and the whole area of “connecting over the internet” functionality has also been given a more descriptive (to the non-techies, anyway) term: Outlook Anywhere.

From an end-user point of view, this technology is almost silent – for remote laptop users working at home, they often just start up their laptop, which connects automatically to a home wireless network and out to the internet, then Outlook just goes straight to Exchange and they’re online. Deploying this technology in Microsoft saw the volume of VPN traffic reduce dramatically, and the calls to the help desk concerning remote access dropped significantly too.

NET: Using Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007 together simplifies the provision of remote access to remote users, particularly when using Outlook in “cached mode”. This configuration reduces, or even removes, the need to provide Virtual Private Network access, which could make the user experience better and save management overhead and expense.

Web client access instead of Outlook

Another element of flexible or remote working might be to use the web to get to email – maybe your remote users just want to quickly check email or calendar on their home PC, rather than using a laptop. Maybe there are workers who want to keep abreast of things when they’re on holiday, and have access to a kiosk or internet cafe type PC. Or perhaps your users are in their normal place of work, but don’t use email much, or don’t log-in to their own PC?

Outlook Web Access has been around for a number of versions of Exchange, and just gets better with every release. The 2007 version has added large areas of functionality (like support for the Unified Messaging functionality in Exchange, or huge improvements in handling the address book), meaning that for a good number of users, it’s as functional as they’d need Outlook to be. It’s increasingly feasible to have users accessing OWA as their primary means of getting to Exchange. One possible side benefit here is a licensing one – although you’d still be required to buy an Exchange Client Access License (which gives the user or the device the rights to connect to the server), you won’t need to buy Outlook or the Microsoft Office suite.

Outlook Web Access not only gives the web-user the ability to use email, calendar etc, but it can also provide access to internal file shares and/or Sharepoint document libraries – where the Exchange server will fetch data from internal sources, and display to the reader within their browser. It can also take Office documents and render them in HTML – so reading a spreadsheet or document could be done on a PC with no copy of Office available, or simply can be read without needing to download a copy of that document for rendering client-side in an application.

It’s possible to control what happens to attachments within OWA – some organisations don’t want people to be able to download attached files, in case they leave copies of them on public PCs like internet cafes – how many users would just save the document to the desktop, and maybe forget to delete it? Using server-side rendering of documents, all traces of the document will be removed when the user logs out or has their connection timed out.

Even for predominantly office-based users, OWA can provide a good way of getting to mail from some other PC, without needing to configure anything or log in to the machine – in that respect, it’s just like Hotmail, where you go to a machine and enter your username and password to access the mail, rather than having to log in to the whole PC as a given users.

If you deploy Outlook Anywhere (aka RPC/HTTP), you’ll already have all the infrastructure you need to enable Outlook Web Access – it uses the same Exchange Client Access server role (in fact, in Microsoft’s own deployment, “Outlook Anywhere” accounts for about 3/4 of all the remote traffic, with the rest being made up of OWA and Exchange Activesync).

NET: Outlook Web Access gives a very functionally-rich yet easy to use means of getting to data held on Exchange and possibly elsewhere on the internal network, in a secure means of communications to an external web browser. OWA 2007 has replicated more of Outlook’s functionality (such as great improvements to accessing address books), such that users familiar with Outlook will need little or no training, and users who don’t have Outlook may be able to rely on OWA as their primary means of accessing mail.

Mobile mail with ActiveSync

Exchange 2003 SP2 and an update to Windows Mobile 5 introduced the first out of the box “push mail” capability for Exchange, which forms part of the Microsoft Exchange Activesync protocol that’s also licensed to a number of other mobile device vendors. This allows Exchange to use the same infrastructure that’s already in place for Web access and for Outlook Anywhere, to push mail to mobile devices and to synchronise other content with them (like calendar updates or contact information). The Exchange Activesync capability in Exchange 2007 has been enhanced further, along with parallel improvements in the new Windows Mobile 6 client software for mobile devices.

Now it’s possible to flag messages for follow-up, read email in HTML format, set Out of Office status, and a whole ton of other functional enhancements which build on the same infrastructure described above. There’s no subscription to an external service required, and no additional servers or other software – reducing the cost of acquisition, deployment, and (potentially) in TCO. Analyst firm Wipro published some research, updated in June 2007, looking into TCO for mobile device platforms in which they conclude that Windows Mobile 5 and Exchange Activesync would be 20-28% lower in cost (over 3 years) than an equivalent Blackberry infrastructure.

NET: Continuing improvements in Exchange 2007 and Windows Mobile 6 will further enhance the user experience of mobile access to mail, calendar, contacts & tasks. Overall costs of ownership may be significantly lower than alternative mobile infrastructures, especially since the Microsoft server requirements may already be in place to service Outlook Anywhere and Outlook Web Access.

A last word on security

Of course, if you’re going to publish an Exchange server – which sits on your internal network, and has access to your internal Active Directory – to the outside world, you’ll need to make sure you take account of good security practice. You probably don’t want inbound connections from what are (at the outset) anonymous clients, coming through your firewall and connecting to Exchange – for one, they’ll have gone through the firewall within an encrypted SSL session (the S part of HTTPS) and since you don’t yet know who the end user is, an outsider could be using that connection as a way of mounting a denial of service attack or similar.

Microsoft’s ISA Server is a certified firewall which can be an end-point for the inbound SSL session (so it decrypts that connection), can challenge the client to authenticate and can inspect that what is going on in that session is a legitimate protocol (and not an attacker trying to flood your server with traffic). The “client” could be a PC running Outlook, a mobile device using Activesync or a web browser trying to access Outlook Web Access. See this whitepaper for more information on publishing Exchange 2007 onto the internet using ISA.

The Joy of Mapping

Posted on by ewand

We all tend to take maps for granted. In the 17th/18th centuries and even beyond, there were decent sized areas of the world which were just being explored and mapped for the first time. Now, the ease of access to cartographical data means we don’t much give them a second thought.

I bought a couple of Ordnance Survey Explorer maps the other day, and was quite surprised at how expensive they are – £7.99 each – and started wondering if they were worth the money, when I could just go ahead and get data online for free. There’s something unique about poring over a real map, though: not necessarily looking for anything, just finding out what’s there. A neighbour came round at one point when I was looking through my new maps, and said that (like I did), he used to sit in the car as a passenger and study the maps around the places they were driving through. He even used to take the Atlas of the World to bed and just look at it, which I figured was a bit weird and best not discussed any further.

Thinking about how accessible mapping information has become brings a few interesting points up, though: Ordnance Survey maps are actually pretty good value given that they must cost a fair bit to print and distribute, and if you’re out on a walk or cycle in the middle of the country, knowing that you could get a decent aerial view from Google Earth or Windows Live Local might not be of any use, whereas a good map in your pocket makes all the difference.

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Meanwhile, I’ve become a big fan of Windows Live Mobile, especially after bonding my CoPilot bluetooth GPS receiver with the Smartphone (tip: it’s a BTGPS3 unit, and the passkey is unfathomly set to 0183 by default).

I’ve also used CoPilot for Smartphone as an in-car GPS/navigation aid, and it works really well (even if you don’t have a place to mount the phone properly, it can bark instructions from the passenger seat, just like a real navigator or navigatrix would). There are also lots of other fun apps (like Jason’s favourite, SportsDo) which can use GPS to record where your device has been – for later analysis on your PC. Or here, a developer at MS has built a real-time GPS locator which sends his coordinates back to a web service on his PC, so his family can see where he is all the time. Spooky, maybe…

Autoroute vs online maps

I remember when the application Autoroute first came out, in the early 1990s: it was an old DOS application which shipped on floppy disks, and cost hundreds of pounds at the time. The target audience was fleet delivery managers and the likes, who would generate route plans for the drivers rather than have the trucks wandering their own route and taking longer/using more fuel than might be optimal. So even though Autoroute cost a lot of money, it could save a lot of money and was considered funds well spent.

Microsoft bought the company who made Autoroute, and released the by-now-Windows-application for a much more reasonable price. Autroute 2007 retails today for about £50, and with a USB GPS receiver, £85.

image It’s quite interesting now that Autoroute 2007 has direct integration with Windows Live Local – so you can find somewhere on Autoroute, then search the web for information about local businesses, or view the aerial/hybrid views from that point. It’s obvious to think that future evolutions of Windows Live Local might offer more of the route planning stuff that Autoroute is so good at, though UI-wise it could be more of a challenge…

Currently, Windows Live Local doesn’t offer the ability to do more than a simple “drive from here/to here” route – there’s no waypoints, no “avoid this area” type functionality. Google Maps does offer some of these things but it’s not quite as slick as Autoroute for now.

Rather than loading up Autoroute, though, it’s often quicker to go straight to the likes of Windows Live Local and zoom to a place you’re looking at (maybe you’re thinking of buying a house, for example – the single most useful aspect of this technology if my experience of house hunting last year is at all typical), so the usage patterns of all these types of applications is changing as the technology gets better.

One cool and current use of mapping technology is Bikely.com, which uses Google Maps to do routes that a user can draw or import from GPS devices, then share with others. Still has a long way to go functionality-wise when it comes to smart route planning, but it’s easy to use to do the basics, and is a good portent of things to come.

The Campaign for Real Pedantry, erm, I mean numbers

Posted on by ewand

Hats off to James O’Neill for a display of true, world-class pedantry to which I could only aspire. It drives me nuts to get emails with badly formatted phone numbers which can’t be dialled on Smartphones without first editing them, and now that I’ve started using Office Communications Server 2007 (more later) as the backbone for my real office phone, it impedes the usability of that too.

James’ beef is that a lot of people incorrectly write a UK phone number which would be defined as 0118 909 nnnn (where 0118 is the area dialing code, and 909nnnn is the local number, the last 4 digits of which form an extension number in this specific example, available through DDI).

Here are some examples of number crime:

  • (0) 118 909 nnnn – Incorrect and useless. Why put the first zero in brackets at all? Nobody is ever going to dial starting ‘118’
  • +44 (0) 118 909 nnnn – Incorrect, though perhaps useful to people who don’t understand country codes. There may well be lots of people out there who don’t ever call international and don’t understand the “+44” model of dialing from a mobile phone. So maybe the (0) will indicated to them that maybe they should add it in… but it could be confusing to overseas dialers who’re calling this number – how do they know if they should dial +44 118 or +44 0 118?
  • +44 (0) (118) 909 nnnn – someone likes the brackets just a little too much
  • +44 (0118) 909 nnnn – even worse than number 2. Either drop the brackets and the 0, or drop the +44 altogether.

The only correct way to write this number is +44 118 909 nnnn, or for the truly pedantic, +44118909nnnn. Maybe you wouldn’t publish an E.164 formatted number (as the scheme is called) as your primary customer services number, and it doesn’t make sense to use it for numbers that won’t be dial-able from abroad (eg some 0870 numbers or 0800 numbers). But for everything else, I’d encourage everyone to please make sure your email signature has a properly formatted number (either simplifying it by dropping the +44 or losing the brackets and leading zero). If your company publishes your number in its online address book, then make sure that’s formatted correctly too so that people using telephone-aware systems (like Windows Mobile or Outlook Voice Access) can correctly call you.

In my profession, if someone doesn’t figure that +44 118 909 nnnn is my phone number and that if they’re in the UK and not in the Reading area, they need to drop +44 and add “0” if they’re dialing from a plain old phone system, then I’m quite happy to have them not phoning me up…

iPhone gets a date

Posted on by ewand

Well I’m sure it’ll have plenty of people courting it when it comes out, but Apple have announced that the iPhone will be available in the US at the end of June.

At least when the phone actually ships, everyone will know what it’s really like rather than the seemingly endless speculation (of which this post is yet another part…) The reason for my adding to the noise concerns the commentary that iPhone will run a version of OS X … that’s as maybe, but the CPU in the phone is a different architecture than either the older PowerPC or the newer Intel cores that the Mac has used for years – though yet to be officially confirmed, it’s said to be using the XScale family (whose lineage goes back to ARM Holdings and Intel, but has been sold off to Marvell).

I used to get irked by people describing Windows CE (the core OS underneath Windows Mobile devices, which has been around for more than a decade) as “a cut-down version of Windows”: it isn’t, never has been. WinCE may share some of the same APIs as Windows (which can make it more straightforward for developers to write software for it, since they do the same/similar things on both platforms), but it’s a long way from being a “cut-down” version.

So even if you’ll be able to buy 3rd-party applications for the iPhone (which Steve Jobs alluded to at last week’s D Conferece), there’s no way you’re going to be taking an existing app from OS X and just pushing it down to the phone. According to All Things D, again:

Whoa. Jobs says iPhone runs “real OS X, real Safari, real desktop email.”
Walt follows up: If that’s true, could other OS X applications run on the iPhone? Jobs says no. They’re not designed to.

I’d venture to suggest that “not designed to” in this case doesn’t mean “not optimisied for”, but instead, “not able to run because the underlying OS and CPU architecture is completely different”. Windows developers can build applications targetted at Windows Mobile using the same tools and many of the same techniques they use to build Windows applications (Visual Studio, in other words), but the apps have to be specifically developed for the platform, given that screen size & orientation and the UI model is so different – and iPhone developers (assuming there will be some besides Apple & Google), will need to do the same.

Blackberry outage – worrying for mobile mail junkies

Posted on by ewand

I just read news of an 11-hour outage in RIM’s Blackberry infrastructure on ZDNet – ouch. Not only did email stop flowing to the devices during the outage, but the backlog of mail which built up is taking time to clear.

Without wishing to gloat (really), users of Windows Mobile devices for push email wouldn’t suffer something like this (with the possible exception of their mobile carrier having a major network outage, which would affect Blackberry users as well and would be unlikely to last so long). Once you’ve deployed a real mobile mail solution, having any kind of serious outage is a worrying thing – especially if users are giving up laptops in order to rely on their mobile devices…

There are some architectural documents which outline the approach to using Windows Mobile and Exchange – such as the one in the Deployment Guide.

If you’re interested in how Direct Push works, you’d do well to check out these posts on the Exchange Team blog too:

The day I met Tony Blair, talked about online healthcare

Posted on by ewand

I am feeling under the weather at the moment.

Been off work for a couple of days with what seems to be some kind of chest infection. I finally decided to stop waiting for it to go away on its own, and went to see the doctor – starting by looking at the website of the surgery, since I’ve moved house in the last year and haven’t had a need to register with the new place yet.

Just as a precaution, I went off to NHS Direct to see what was wrong with me – they have a wizard that asks you about the symptoms you might be experiencing, after you give it a steer. So I thought, “Breathing difficulties in Adults”, yep… then filled out the next set of answers… 

Now my lips aren’t blue (as far as I recall), I can talk OK but now and again do have a bit of a wheeze, so that sounds about right..

YIKES. Anyway, I’m pretty confident I’m not in the midst of a heart attack so I’ll ignore that advice for now.

Having a look around my doctor’s website, though, it turns out they are now offering appointments which can be made online. Now that seems like a great step in the right direction for busy people. It set me thinking about the time when the UK’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his wife & entourage, dropped in to see us in Microsoft UK.

 

The Blairs visit

This was in the run up to the June 2001 election, and the Labour Party had asked if Tony, Cherie & co could come and see us on the day they launched their business manifesto. Of course, Microsoft said yes, and went ahead arranging an event in our central atrium where we would do a few demos to the PM and Mrs Blair, on some forthcoming technology (Office XP) and some future directions stuff.

I was asked to do one of the demos, and with a colleague concocted a mock-up of a system that might be imlemented some time in the future, but in this case was using a Pocket PC with Wireless LAN (then a PCMCIA card in a Jacket that clipped to the back of a still-shiny Compaq iPaq).

(that’s me at the bottom in case you haven’t guessed)

The demo was a little app which a health visitor might use if doing a home visit to a couple with a new born baby, notices the baby’s a bit off-colour. The app would:

  •  issue a prescription of the appropriate medicine
  • let the parents chose which pharmacists they’d like to have the prescription details sent to automatically (advising back when the prescription would be ready for collection)
  • arranged a date of a follow-up appointment with a doctor at the surgery, based on their availability and the parents’ preference of time.

SIx years ago, this might not have looked like rocket science to IT people but could really change the way healthcare is delivered. Now, it looks like a straightforward thing to do technically, what with advances is size and power of mobile devices which would be 3G connected or similar.

I stepped through the wizard on the device, which was being shown on Plasma screens all round the place, and the deal was that I’d give the device to Mr Blair at the end of the wizard, so he could sign the prescription (as the parent, obviously – at this point, the Blairs had a fairly young baby themselves, so that scenario seemed plausible).

The trouble was, in order for the signature to be visible on screen, I had to remember to tap in a specific place (to set the cursor at the right point, actually) and in the nerves of the situation, forgot – so I handed the PM the device, asked him to sign, which he duly did with a flourish… but nothing came up on the screen. He did look a little bemused (and smiling) while handing the device back, but said nothing … he’s either a total pro, or had literally no idea what was going on… I’ll leave the judgment to yourselves 🙂 I just mumbled something about the signature being secure etc, and moved on quickly…

Anyway, the visit seemd to go well, and the whole demos were broadcast live on Sky News (where the news presenter said, on coming back to the studio after my piece, that he felt sorry for the PM after receiving “an ear bashing like that”!) There was a little negative commentary from the usual places, but otherwise a day to remember – for me at least, if not for the guests of honour!

Remote control of Windows Mobile

Posted on by ewand

The other day when I posted about VIrtual Earth Mobile, I was using some really great software to do remote control of my device and screen capture from the PC… SOTI Pocket Controller Professional.

It’s perfect for demoing Windows Mobile devices… even comes with a huge library of skins (which are updated online) so you can match the screen output from your device as its displayed on the PC to a surround which is identical, adding to the realism of the thing. Oh, and if you have a device which rotates the screen, the software auto-detects when you do that, and it redraws the skin in rotated mode – cool!

One tip: using USB/Activesync (or WMDC in Vista) as the connection method works fine for the basic show’n’tell, but some things aren’t available – device connectivity can be a bit confused, since it sees the Activesync connection as a possible route to the internet, but the PC might be disconnected. Also, the actual Activesync options (eg Schedule for sync) are grayed out when connected on a cable.

I use it over a Bluetooth PAN… so I connect the device to the PC as a network adapter (doubly useful in that it puts the PC on the net too), and then connect to the IP address of the device, which is always 192.168.0.1 (since it’s the gateway through which the PC will connect). That way, your PC is connected, the device is visible, and all the connectivity (such as Direct Push mail) & other options work just fine.

Virtual Earth Mobile – mapping on the move

Posted on by ewand

Microsoft’s Virtual Earth technology continues to take strides forward – not just in the inevitable mash-ups, but in new ways of accessing the maps (as well as from http://local.live.com … which I keep on trying to access as live.local.com… d’oh). There are 3D maps in beta, as well as a cool add-in for Outlook 2000/3 (though yet to be updated for Outlook 2007).


I installed a newer version of Virtual Earth Mobile on my Pocket PC the other day… on searching for a business called Microsoft in Reading, here’s what I was offered as an initial map…


 


Switching to road + aerial, zooming in a bit and sliding the keyboard out to rotate the screen gives us…



… and it can still zoom in two more levels, so you can make out specific details like the parasols outside the restaurant!


I actually used this to get to a customer today – arrived at Waterloo station and realised that I didn’t know which immediate streets I needed to follow to get to the address I’d been given. I just searched for the street name, showed aerial view, walked past the London Eye and found it with no hassle … be careful though: prolonged use could lead to very large data bills 🙂


Have a look yourself from the Windows Mobile Blog.

Orange announces SPV E650 Smartphone

Posted on by ewand

Now this looks interesting… as part of the slew of announcements surrounding Windows Mobile 6 which were made at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona, Orange have started talking about their SPV E650 Smartphone, which is based on the HTC Vox device. Details from Modaco:

It isn’t 3G, which is a bit of a pity, but looks like a nice compromise of size and functionality… I still fancy the “Excalibur” (aka HTC S620) as a Smartphone, though…

Windows Mobile 6 – aka Crossbow

Posted on by ewand

I’ve been in Seattle all week at a technical conference and have been largely living on Windows Mobile devices … I have a QTek 8500 Smartphone (which is really nice and small Smartphone), a Palm Treo 750 (a Pocket PC with a smaller screen and built in thumboard) and an Orange SPV M3100 (larger PPC with slide out keyboard, Wifi etc). I’ve also been using Windows Mobile 6 (aka Crossbow) on a couple of other devices for ages… and have gotten really used to some of its new functionality regarding the way e-mail, calendar etc is handled when running against an Exchange 2007 server.

Jason (who was yesterday presenting to a room of 500 screaming and yelling people whilst – I kid you not – dressed as a pirate) has posted on his Mr Mobile! blog with a great summary of what’s new in Windows Mobile 6…

… now I can’t wait to see it hit the streets on some of the exciting devices that are out now or will be coming soon!

//Ewan