As you can see, like most technologies, PDA's are surrounded by lots of opinions. Often people like what they have used, even if it is only one type and have no real basis for a comparison (i.e. valid opinion).
Ok, the ugly truth: None of the systems out there are very good yet. You've heard the positives for Blackberry and PocketPC's. Palm devices and the various phone/PDA combinations have their benefits as well. Everyone of them costs too much for what they do, and have some major design flaws. Also, the carrier based services are designed to try and nudge subscriber billings upward, as opposed to delivering desired services. In my view, the right thing to do is to design a target remote access architecture for your network and then fit your Exchange system into it, along with your other key services. Portals are popular, but lots of people are doing terrible portal designs. The current fad is for a PHB committee to form a portal team or project and b figure out what a "community" should see. They virtually never ask the users what they need, and they never do quality checks by metering the usage and measuring what is working or not. Finding a decent portal implementation is like looking for a single marble in the sand at Fort Lauderdale beach. Portal stupidity is the current hallmark of CIO resumes. Ideally, you would link Exchange to your portal, and then your PDA would hit it from the other side and give you both on-line functionality and optional synchronization services. However, I have yet to see a portal that does synching, and the PocketPC, which ought to be better at this, is still saddled with its ridiculous "PC Companion" paradigm, which assumes that you want to talk to your desktop PC, and not the servers directly, even though that is a security violation in most enterprises if it is done remotely. There is some good news, but it is out a ways. The next generation of PocketPC devices that start appearing next summer should be a lot better, and address some of their current short comings. I believe that just as soon as a really good combination of tools is available, that it will be so compelling that everything else will have to quickly conform or disappear from the market. But alas, that is not this year. Sorry. -----Original Message----- From: Pennell, Ronald B. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 7:33 AM To: Exchange Discussions Cc: Pennell, Ronald B. Subject: PDA recommendations for access to Exchange 2000 mailboxes Has anyone had any experiences with using PDA's for accessing user mailboxes? Our company is starting to research use of PDA's. So far I have done some research on the BlackBerry site. Any recommendations as to server software for E2K SP2. Any hardware recommendations for the PDA's Thanks in advance Ron Pennell [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
