Tuesday, September 30, 2008

BIG News in wireless synchronisation

The big news that everyone is talking about is the announcement by Nokia that they are dropping Intellisync...and their $430 million dollar investment that went along with it. Dropping that kind of cash is news enough in itself. Dropping support for a product that you have convinced thousands if not millions of people to use...is another story.

Comments from pundits are starting to surface and it's too early to gauge the reaction to the move by giant Nokia. Our attention is immediately drawn to the situation now faced by the millions of GroupWise users the world over. Intellisync is/was the "guts" of the GroupWise Mobile Server...so now what? Poor GroupWise gets kicked in the groin again by one of its "partners" and once again we're reminded to be careful what we wish for. Support for your product by a monster organization like Nokia, may be a curse disguised as a blessing or the proverbial "wolf in sheeps clothing". I dare say the GroupWise team got bitten on the behind with this move!

Fortunately for the wireless mobility world...there is NotifyLink. As one wireless platform provider after another bites the dust, NotifyLink stands strong.

If you're not using NotifyLink now, dump what you're using before they dump you! Come to a company offering a product you can trust for the long haul. We've been here since the birth of mobility and we're remain determined to provide the worlds best third party mobility application. You will continue to have the CHOICE to use what ever email platform, device, wireless carrier and data plan that YOU CHOOSE.

We say it's time to stand up and tell your carrier what YOU want!

**These opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organizations about which I write.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Nokia gives corporate email the push


Nokia is to give up on corporate email and pushed applications, leaving all that to third-party companies while it concentrates on selling push email to ordinary punters.

The moment RIM proved that push email was such an important gateway into corporations, everyone started furiously developing competing services while carefully stepping around RIMs patents (often unsuccessfully).

Nokia's effort culminated in the purchase of Intellisync in 2005 for $430m, with the intention of offering businesses a push-email solution with a Nokia brand.
But the plethora of competing technologies, along with the obtuse reluctance of IT departments to support a wide variety of email gateways, has made the market fiercely competitive. It's also a business that doesn't really fit with Nokia's consumer-services-brand aspirations, so the company says that in future it will "form its enterprise solutions... by combining Nokia devices and applications with software solutions from industry leading enterprise vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and others".

The Intellisync business isn't big enough to be worth selling off as a going concern, so the company is left to claim that "technologies and expertise will be reallocated to Nokia's new consumer push email service" - so a $430m investment gets folded into the Ovi service and the Intellisync brand disappears entirely.

Meanwhile Nokia's security-appliance business is being wrapped up for a potential sale as part of what Nokia calls its "renewal of its business mobility strategy".
Microsoft, RIM and their ilk might have corporate email sewn up, but Nokia believes the market for personal email services is still wide open - though between Google and Apple the opportunity won't last much longer

New Google patent to help consumers


While we all thought Google’s Android was merely a way for Google to make it easier for is AdWords ads to appear on your cell phone, a new patent filing could reveal a larger goal.
A bidding system where wireless providers bid to offer the lowest calling rates for your unlocked cell phone.

Here’s how ComputerWorld describes the new Google patent application:

…When at home, the device would attach to the user’s Wi-Fi network…But once outside, the device could periodically search for other available service providers, asking the service providers to bid for the chance to offer service to the customer. The device could automatically switch to the network that has the best price without interrupting a user’s voice call or data connection.

On the back end, a program on the phone could contact each of the available networks individually, or the phone could instead communicate with a central server that handles the negotiations with each service provider.


Thursday, September 18, 2008

List of Activesync relative deficiencies

Here is a short list of deficiencies included for free in Exchange Active Sync. Latest version of EAS is: 4.5.5096.0

1. No ability to lock a device remotely
2. Remote PC Sync (via WiFi or LAN) has been removed due to Enterprise customer feedback around security issues. Microsoft® Outlook® 2000 is not supported by ActiveSync .
3. Starting with Windows Vista, ActiveSync has been replaced with the Windows Mobile Device Center, which is included as part of the operating system
4. EAS may not connect after joining the workstation to a domain

NL v4.5 has been certified against CGP v5.2.7.

Notify Technology Corp. (NTFY) of San Jose, CA, announced today that they have certified NotifyLink v4.5 against CommunigatePro v5.2.7.

This means users of CGP's latest version can be assured of full bi-directional synchronization of email, calendar, contacts and tasks when using NotifyLink for any BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Palm or Symbian 9.1s60r3 device.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

NL v4.5 supports Scalix 11.4.1

Notify Technology (NTFY), San Jose, CA today announced full version 4.5 support for Scalix 11.4.1

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Touch BlackBerry



More than rumors are surfacing regarding RIM's new BlackBerry 9500 or "Thunder" as some are calling the new smartphone.


Taken from GeniusBoyReport


No, it doesn’t have the amount of hype and speculation an iPhone did before its release, but we don’t think there has even been this much anticipation for a BlackBerry, ever. The hidden-in-a-dark-secret-underground-lab BlackBerry 9xxx has sent out a couple distress calls to us, pleading to let people know it’s coming and what it should have in store for the incredibly faithful and addicted BlackBerry users. First off, 3G. It most certainly will have a 3G radio and we’re not talking about the European bands. (The actual 3G bands are not yet clear, but we can only assume North American 3G is a go.) Second, this isn’t your momma’s 3G, this is going to be HSDPA. Forget the Wi-Fi scam, this is real speed with simultaneous voice and data! That isn’t the best part, though…we’ve been told it will rock a 600MHz processor! Finally. We shouldn’t have those necessary and annoying lag times when performing basic tasks, and there should be a drastic reduction of the bottleneck for Internet speeds on the device. What we reported ages ago still seems to be spot on — RIM is actively looking at integrating a Backup/Restore function to facilitate transferring your entire backup to an on board memory card.


Google Apps Premier Edition customers seeing challenges

GOOGLE made a bold move towards "Cloud Computing" with the release of their still in BETA, Google Premier Edition Apps. Prospects are reporting several challenges with the new broswer based application suite.

More alarming are the reports that "bugs" are not being fixed and than customer enhancement requests are met with a stone wall or worse.... Some Google sales representatives are telling customers and prospects that they don't need the features they are requesting and that Google did their research before developing and releasing Google Apps.

We've had one report from an Enterprise user that their suggestion to adopt a "superuser" strategy to deal with onerous corporate password change policies. Google reps replied that this is not necessary and is not being requested by any of our other customers, therefore will not be considered at this time...LOL...really? Because of this one factor alone, Enterprise customer's are turning away in DROVES...from using Google Apps.

NotifyLink works with Google Apps to add the mobility piece of the "mobile worker equation". With any BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Palm or Symbian 9.1x60r3, you can use NotifyLink to get email, calendar and contacts bi-directionally synchronized with your server based email/PIM account.

Nokia and Symbian deemed by some "Irrelevant"


SAN FRANCISCO -- Symbian Ltd. and Nokia Corp. defended the relevance of the two companies in today’s market Wednesday during a roundtable discussion that focused on the creation of the Symbian Foundation.


In August, Forbes.com reported that some in Silicon Valley aren’t too keen of the Finnish handset giant. During a conference in July organized by tech blog Michael Arrington, David Rivas, Nokia VP in charge of smartphone software, was interrupted as he spoke about the company to a group of venture capitalists and software developers.


As Rivas talked about Nokia’s position in Korea and Japan and the thought that the Web hadn’t been mobile until the iPhone, someone in the crowd told Rivas to, “Wake Up,” Forbes reported. Arrington then added from the stage, “I believe that Nokia and Symbian are irrelevant companies at this point.”


Symbian provides the software for Nokia’s smartphones. Earlier this summer, Nokia announced it acquired total ownership of Symbian for a reported $411 million. The Symbian Foundation is being created to combine Nokia’s S6o platform with the Symbian platform into a single smartphone operating system.


When asked about Arrington’s comment Wednesday, David Wood, Symbian VP of research, said Symbian has seen a growth in sales and more handset models are in development than ever before. Wood also said the company has 92 different floor models available and each have average sales of 1 million. Wood also said the consulting aspect of Symbian has increased its revenue by 76% this year.


“We have a lot of engaging and exciting projects we are working on,” Wood said.


Wood also touts the formation of the Symbian Foundation. Shortly after the Forbes article was published, Wood wrote that the foundation would provide “new routes to market for Symbian technology, as well as more rapid collaborative development.


”Oren Levine, a Nokia product marketing manager of the S6o organization, questions anyone who says the company is irrelevant based on the fact that Nokia has sold 200 million devices in almost every country in the world. Symbian OS is also used on two-thirds of all smartphones worldwide, according to the company.


“By no means can you call it irrelevant,” Levine said.Christy Wyatt, who leads Motorola’s software platform and ecosystem groups, also defended Nokia and Symbian.“We wouldn’t be here if we thought Symbian was irrelevant,” Wyatt said.

Monday, September 8, 2008

Google starting to listen to customer's


This email was recently sent to Google Apps Premier Edition customer's.


We’re committed to making Google Apps Premier Edition a service on which your organization can depend. During the first half of August, we didn’t do this as well as we should have. We had three outages - on August 6, August 11, and August 15. The August 11 outage was experienced by nearly all Google Apps Premier users while the August 6 and 15 outages were minor and affected a very small number of Google Apps Premier users. As is typical of things associated with Google, these outages were the subject of much public commentary.


Through this note, we want to assure you that system reliability is a top priority at Google. When outages occur, Google engineers around the world are immediately mobilized to resolve the issue. We made mistakes in August, and we’re sorry. While we’re passionate about excellence, we can’t promise you a future that’s completely free of system interruptions. Instead, we promise you rapid resolution of any production problem; and more importantly, we promise you focused discipline on preventing recurrence of the same problem.


Given the production incidents that occurred in August, we’ll be extending the full SLA credit to all Google Apps Premier customers for the month of August, which represents a 15-day extension of your service. SLA credits will be applied to the new service term for accounts with a renewal order pending. This credit will be applied to your account automatically so there’s no action needed on your part.


We’ve also heard your guidance around the need for better communication when outages occur. Here are three things that we’re doing to make things better:


1. We’re building a dashboard to provide you with system status information. This dashboard, which we aim to make available in a few months, will enable us to share the following information during an outage:


a. A description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact. Our belief is during the course of an outage, we should be singularly focused on solving the problem. Solving production problems involves an investigative process that’s iterative. Until the problem is solved, we don’t have accurate information around root cause, much less corrective action, that will be particularly useful to you. Given this practical reality, we believe that informing you that a problem exists and assuring you that we’re working on resolving it is the useful thing to do. b. A continuously updated estimated time-to-resolution. Many of you have told us that it’s important to let you know when the problem will be solved. Once again, the answer is not always immediately known. In this case, we’ll provide regular updates to you as we progress through the troubleshooting process.


2. In cases where your business requires more detailed information, we’ll provide a formal incident report within 48 hours of problem resolution. This incident report will contain the following information:
a. business description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact;b. technical description of the problem, with emphasis on root cause;c. actions taken to solve the problem;d. actions taken or to be taken to prevent recurrence of the problem; ande. time line of the outage.


3. In cases where your business requires an in-depth dialogue about the outage, we’ll support your internal communication process through participation in post-mortem calls with you and your management team.


Once again, thanks for you continued support and understanding.


Sincerely,The Google Apps Team