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Survivor's Guide to 2007: Mobile and Wireless: Page 5 of 8

With senior management stimulating demand, most enterprise IT organizations have embraced mobile e-mail, but often in a tactical manner. With the imminent release of Outlook 2007 and improvements to hosted e-mail and behind-the-firewall solutions, many will find it beneficial to reassess strategic directions during 2007. As you open this can of worms, look beyond simple mail and give significant thought to new applications, including mobile IM and CRM, as well as mobile security and device management.

In addition, don't forget the low-hanging fruit. Almost every organization, small to large, can take advantage of WWAN PC Card modems offered by all the carriers. These cards are often given away as an inducement for shelling out $60 per month for service. That's one of the biggest bargains you'll ever find, especially if you can share one setup among a group of employees on an as-needed basis. Embedded 3G modems, which make wide-area access even easier, also are available on an increasing variety of notebook computers, but in our tests we've found them less flexible than PC Cards: You can't share among employees, and they typically lock your notebook to a specific carrier.

Mobile Data Quest

In 2007 we'll witness early skirmishes in the most significant wireless market battle in history, as 3G, metro Wi-Fi and WiMAX square off for mobile broadband supremacy.

This is a battle for market survival: Delivering wireless service in the top 50 U.S. metro areas lets a provider reach the vast majority of business and consumer users. That's opened the door for potential competitors to entrenched 3G service providers. Lots of people are betting that metro Wi-Fi and Mobile WiMAX will provide better broadband wireless services at lower cost, and that the ecosystems will rapidly evolve to let these technologies condemn 3G to legacy status.