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.
RSS
