Yesterday, we announced the upcoming "direct push technology" for mobile devices that we will be releasing in the upcoming Messaging & Security Feature Pack for Exchange Server 2003.
"Direct Push Technology" is real-time, always-on, IMMEDIATE delivery of email to your mobile device running Windows Mobile 5.0. Yes, that’s right… just like a RIM Blackberry. Except now you get your choice of device software and form factor to use. Rugged? Stylish? Color? Cheap? Expensive? Built-in keyboard? Slide-out keyboard? Super small? Extended battery life? 600mhz processor? .NET framework inside?
Now, you get to choose. And you’ll always get your mail immediately, without delay.
The ‘direct push technology’ accomplishes this by establishing an maintaining an HTTP/S pipe from the Exchange Server ‘front end server’ (usually the OWA server) to your mobile device over the data network of your carrier, like Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, or AT&T/Cingular. This pipe is ‘put to sleep’ to maintain a connection but to minimize actual traffic to "keep the connection alive". This allows the server side to scale to 1000’s of devices.
I’ve noticed that some folks in the press are calling this a "Blackberry killer" because with this Feature Pack, there’s no need for a Blackberry Enterprise Server to act as an intermediary any more to get ‘push-enabled mail’. There might be some truth to this but one thing’s for certain: Now Exchange Server 2003 owners will now be able to get "direct push" to their PDAs, out-of-the-box, without paying for anything extra.
And in the same Service Pack, we’ll be releasing SenderID support to filter out email spam without a return domain that matches it’s originating IP address.
"Microsoft’s enterprise messaging server will gain antiphishing capabilities before the end of the year, the company said Monday. Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2, due in the fourth quarter, will feature Sender ID support, the first implementation of this e-mail authentication technology in Microsoft’s messaging and collaboration server."
All out of the box… no extra charge. That’s value.
Exchange Server 2003 SP2:
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/downloads/2003/sp2/faq.mspx
Feature Pack:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/business/5/default.mspx
Press Release:
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/06-06-2005/0003818225&EDATE=
Background story on Direct Push & "How this all works":
http://blogs.technet.com/exchange/archive/2005/06/07/406035.aspx
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 