Earlier this week at TechEd Europe in Barcelona, Microsoft
presented its future vision for mobile computing with the support
of several partners.
Microsoft Mobile Information Server Enterprise Edition is a new
server designed to allow users to co-ordinate the reception of
e-mail while away from the office. MMIS enables the user to
redirect e-mail alerts to their mobile device. Using the rules
inside Microsoft Exchange, users can decide what e-mail should be
transferred to their mobile inbox. According to Microsoft, the
product can be deployed by a corporate IT department without
additional components from a mobile carrier, although the user will
lose the ability to encrypt their e-mail.
Wireless e-mail service
In a bid to provide tighter
support for pull and push mechanisms of content delivery and
provide a secure, encrypted channel, Microsoft has also launched
MMIS Carrier Edition.
Vodafone and Telefonica have both signed up as partners. Vodafone
will begin providing services from the end of July 2001 and
Telefonica are to launch services during Q3/01. At present, neither
company has announced how it intends to price the service but
Telefonica has suggested that there would be a fixed monthly access
fee coupled with a download charge.
Microsoft's intention is to compete with all of the other e-mail
forwarding systems across any mobile infrastructure. This means
that unlike wireless e-mail provider Blackberry, which has limited
itself to using GPRS, Microsoft will also be supporting WAP phones.
Developing wireless services
Another facet of the
strategy is Mobile Information Toolkit, a product designed to allow
developers to build Web services that can use MMIS as a server. MIT
will be released with VisualStudio.NET although it is just a
plug-in component and will be maintained by its own product team.
The importance of MIT is that Microsoft will be providing support
for a number of devices to allow you to validate your WML code so
that it is correctly formatted for the target device.
To support MIT and the device targeting component there is also a
desktop Microsoft Mobile Explorer (MME) that will act as an
emulator. For developers this provides a chance to test against
devices that they may not have in-house but would want to
support.
Moving forward, Microsoft is less clear about how it will include
additional device support, the level of support that will be added
and how it will charge for it.
There are already a small number of companies such as Argogroup,
which provide device-targeting components.
The MME also edges Microsoft closer to being able to provide
browser support across a wide range of mobile devices. The PocketPC
phones from vendors like Trium, Sendo and Sagem are already
beginning to appear in quantity on the market and Sony will be
launching its device in Europe shortly.