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R E V I E W

E-Mail Without Wires

May 29, 2003
By Dave Molta

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Selection Criteria

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Selection Criteria
	Synchrologic
	Extended Systems
	Good Technology
	Research in Motion (RIM)
	Sprint-Seven
	T-Mobile
	Executive Summary \| Scenario \| Evaluating Wireless E-Mail ROI
	Responses To RFIs

From an enterprise perspective, deploying wireless e-mail services leads to a wide range of selection, implementation and management challenges. First and foremost is integration with existing e-mail systems. Given their market dominance, it's not surprising that most wireless e-mail vendors support Exchange and Domino. A lesser number support IMAP and other popular Internet protocols. But beyond the explicit support of a particular platform, there are subjective issues of how transparently they support those platforms. Synchrologic and Extended Systems support the native e-mail client on a particular device; this is great to the extent that you like the standard e-mail client on your Pocket PC or Palm unit. RIM, Good and Seven reject that approach, asserting that their secret sauce rests in the design of the client e-mail interface.

The second integration issue involves the degree to which vendors support mobile devices already deployed in your organization. Some sites find it very difficult to dictate mobile device types, while others are willing to exercise a heavier hand. Whatever your approach, there's clearly value in a system that provides options. For example, Good supports its own device as well as the RIM platform, and it has promised support for Palm and Pocket PC later this year. T-Mobile markets a variety of offerings, though the jack-of-all-trades syndrome may affect the depth of support you can expect.

Because these e-mail systems pass sensitive information across a public network infrastructure and through open radio airwaves, security is a critical element of the selection process. Fortunately, most vendors have done their homework in this area, providing robust authentication, privacy and auditing capabilities, even going as far as automating the centralized deletion of content on lost and stolen devices.

Cover Your Back End

IT professionals have no choice but to focus on back-end issues, but this is an application that demands significant focus on the user experience as well. Processing e-mail on a handheld device is different from doing so in a desktop or notebook computing environment. The most notable difference, of course, is the keyboard--or lack of one.

You'll need to consider other user-oriented issues as well. The quality and broad geographic availability of wireless service is extremely important, as is the conduciveness of the system to offline e-mail processing. Other important concerns include the seamlessness of synchronization when users process e-mail on multiple devices, the ability to process e-mail attachments and the overall ease of use of the application and the mobile operating environment.

Most organizations that consider deploying wireless e-mail also understand the broader issue of the wireless data application infrastructure. In addition to e-mail, most users want PIM capabilities, including synchronized calendaring and access to contact databases, and an increasing number also value instant messaging services. Longer term, organizations may plan to add wireless capabilities to other enterprise information systems, including ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) systems. Most vendors have some capabilities in these areas.

As for price, wireless e-mail systems generally are expensive, mainly because of the cost of wireless data services. Service providers market wireless e-mail as a value-added service, so they're banking on increased connection revenues for their profits. But the costs are there with all the products, even if the wireless e-mail system may be agnostic when it comes to preferred wireless service (for an in-depth analysis of wireless e-mail ROI, see "Evaluating Wireless E-Mail ROI,").

MSE's Best Buy

The solutions we evaluated are varied, and each has some advantages, but for our RFI scenario we were most impressed with Synchrologic: Its Mobile Suite provides a strategic in-house mobile middleware infrastructure that not only delivers effective wireless e-mail to a range of different devices, but also addresses other key mobile application and device management needs. Extended Systems provided a similar offering with its XTNDConnect Server, but it lacked the polish of Mobile Suite.

For a more tactical rollout, we might have considered one of the outsourced service offerings from Sprint or T-Mobile, which would have let us get in the game quickly while off-loading the back-end tasks to the carriers. Somewhere in between were the solutions from RIM and Good. More strategic than carrier solutions, these systems are optimized almost entirely for wireless e-mail services, including specialized mobile devices that provide arguably the best mobile mail user experience. However, they lack the flexibility of the middleware solutions.

Because these offerings vary so widely we did not grade them comparatively in a standard report card. In our RFI we asked vendors to analyze ROI; we've summarized their responses in our analysis. We'll lead off with MSE's choice, Synchrologic; other reviews are in alphabetical order. You can find the complete vendor RFI responses here.