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E-Mail Without Wires
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May 29, 2003
By Dave Molta
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If your organization is like most, many of your mobile workers use cellular phones and e-mail to communicate. Cellular voice provides immediacy, but this synchronous one-to-one form of communication doesn't always meet the needs of mobile professionals. E-mail is often a better tool because it lets them request and provide information--to groups and individuals--in a less time-sensitive manner. The downside: Processing e-mail on the road is the stuff of horror stories.
Wireless e-mail could combine the best of both worlds. It's immediate and always available--no more fumbling around with dial-up accounts and VPN access. Not all users need that immediacy (some avoid it at all costs), but in the right situation it can be the difference between success and failure.
Wireless e-mail has been around for a while, but it's just now going mainstream in a big way. Providers see tremendous growth potential: Only about 1 percent of enterprise users now have wireless e-mail on small mobile devices, but that percentage will swell to more than 60 percent in 2007, according to Gartner, and it will likely be the most widely used application on emerging high-speed mobile data networks.
Implementing wireless e-mail is a chore, though, because wireless networks don't work like wired networks, and mobile employees don't process e-mail the way their desk-bound colleagues do. We took on the task of evaluating wireless e-mail technology by issuing a Request for Information on behalf of our fictitious engineering services company, McDonald and Seifert Engineering, aka MSE (see scenario,). MSE, an engineering services firm that recently completed a search for a wireless hotspot provider (see "Wireless Hotspots Heat Up"), does business around the world and struggles to meet the communications needs of its mobile sales and field services staff. Wireless e-mail seems like the perfect solution.
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We issued our mock RFI to leading companies in the wireless e-mail market. Unfortunately, two prominent players--Microsoft and IBM--were no-shows. IBM declined our invitation without providing a reason, while Microsoft directed us to one of its partners, Infowave, which also declined. The companies that did participate--Extended Systems, Good Technology, Research in Motion (RIM), a Sprint-Seven partnership, Synchrologic and T-Mobile--represent a cross-section of the industry.
They also provide a good mix of technical approaches that match up with the current market. A recent research report from the Yankee Group identified three categories of wireless e-mail:
• Behind-the-firewall server solutions: Organizations that implement behind-the-firewall server systems install gateways that work with existing e-mail environments, primarily Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino, and use public wireless networks to send and receive mail using mobile devices. Extended Systems, Good, RIM and Synchrologic provide behind-the firewall solutions, while both Sprint and T-Mobile offer these systems as options.
• Network-based solutions: Organizations that don't want the management overhead associated with behind-the-firewall solutions can turn to service providers for help, essentially outsourcing the gateway services while still integrating with existing enterprise e-mail systems. Sprint and T-Mobile use this approach.
• Desktop redirectors: In some respects the simplest solution, the desktop redirector distributes the gateway function to individual client computers, where a redirector transparently moves e-mail from the client to the user's mobile device. Desktop redirectors are effective because they link your desktop e-mail client to the mobile device--it doesn't matter what's on the back end. However, this type of solution doesn't scale well, and often has security and reliability problems. Sprint and T-Mobile offer desktop redirector solutions.
In 2002, more than three-quarters of the wireless e-mail deployments were behind-the-firewall, according to Yankee Group, which projects a very slight trend toward network-based solutions through 2008 (see "U.S. Corporate Wireless E-Mail Forecast" chart).
Yankee's categorization captures only one dimension of these trends, though. IT managers must examine how vendors aim to deliver wireless e-mail, from device and user-interface perspectives. RIM and Good have spent the most time developing the user interface, going so far as to design and build mobile devices optimized for e-mail. Carriers, meanwhile, focus more on smart phones that integrate e-mail and telephony into a single device designed for their networks (RIM also provides phone/e-mail devices for a variety of networks). The mobile middleware vendors take the most strategic enterprise approach, viewing e-mail as just one of many emerging mobile applications that will require appropriate infrastructure.
Many of today's systems are constrained by the limitations of mobile wireless networks. Some solutions, like Good's, still depend on first-generation, low-bandwidth wireless systems--for example, Cingular's Mobitex, which was designed for paging applications. Confronted with bandwidth limitations, vendors have gotten creative, providing sophisticated data-compression and advanced message-filtering capabilities. In essence, they've proved that it is possible to get serious work done with slow wireless networks. At the same time, most vendors support or plan to support emerging 2.5G cellular wireless systems which, while much slower than a typical LAN connection, may prove to be ideal platforms for wireless e-mail services. Some vendor solutions are network-neutral and will work over any IP connection, including emerging WLAN hotspots.
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