Any professional hoping to provide the proper service to their clientele must have mobile communication technologies in their arsenal.  Aside from a cell phone the next piece of mobile technology anyone can get to be more effective is a smartphone with real-time time synchronization.  I prefer my iPhone to anything else.  You can have your email, calendar, and contacts all in the palm of your hand.

 Unfortunately many people get frustrated with their smartphones when they get them because they don’t come with full functionality.  …They come dumb.  One can easily setup their smartphone to receive email, but what happens to the email once it’s on your phone?  What about the email you send from your phone?  The simple answer is:  It all stays on your phone.  When you go back to your computer you’ll have to download, read, and delete all of those emails you’ve already processed on your phone.  The same is true going in the opposite direction.  If you read, delete, and respond to emails on your computer, those actions are not reflected on your phone.  Instead of being more efficient, you’re doing double work.  This is a huge waste of time.  Not to mention the manual synchronizing you’ll have to do between your Outlook and phone.  If you want your calendar, contacts, and tasks on your phone, you’ll have to plug the phone into the computer and wait for it to go through a synchronization process before you’re phone and computer are on the same page.  I ran in to trouble with my first smart phone.  I would schedule appointments on the road, but forget to sync to my computer and then schedule more work at the same time in my office.  This is a very cumbersome process, but there is hope. 

The reason for all of these issues is the email host.  We don’t have the right kind to do what we need to.  When most businesses first get email setup, they usually get POP email.  With POP email your host’s only role is to collect your email on their servers so you can download it.  Whatever you use to download your email, such as a smartphone or Outlook on your computer, it is considered an endpoint.  They are endpoints because that’s as far as the information goes.  The mail is collected on the server and then distributed to individual endpoints.  With a POP email system the endpoints do not communicate.  When email gets to them it’s their responsibility to store and manage the emails.  That’s why the email processing you do on your computer isn’t reflected on your phone and vice versa.  The same rings true if you access your email from multiple computers.  Now you have unique information in several different places…a backup, security, and productivity nightmare!

This is why people trying to get their smartphones to work with their POP email host are always forwarding themselves email they’ve already received and responding to emails multiple times.  More time is spent managing the email between individual endpoints then on productivity.  A POP email host is not involved with your other Outlook information, such as your calendar and contacts.  This information is stored locally on your computer.  If you want to access this information remotely you’ll have to access your computer because that’s where everything is stored.  Or you can waist a bunch of time plugging your phone into your computer and syncing manually.

For this smartphone thing to work properly we need something to manage this information for us.  To really make these devices work right, you need to hook them up to a server.  Exchange is Microsoft’s email server and is the driving force behind almost all mobile syncing technology.  With an Exchange mailbox one can access their email, calendar, and contacts from any Internet connection in 3 ways. 

1)      Outlook on your computer.
2)      Outlook Web Access (OWA) on someone else’s computer
3)      You’re smartphone

Microsoft’s Exchange server stores and manages all of your information for you.  Your email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes are all located on the server not the individual endpoints.  You only use the endpoints to access the information on the server.  Now everything is centralized!  Whenever you make a change on any endpoint, the action is updated on the server and the next time you access your mailbox from another endpoint, it will be updated.  So if you read an email on your phone, it will be read on your computer.  And if you respond to an email on your phone, you’ll have the sent message in your sent items folder.  Type in a new contact on your computer and it will be on your phone in seconds.  The same is true in the other direction.  Read or delete something in Outlook on your computer and the change is reflected on your phone…all in real time!  Lost your phone?  No problem, we can remotely wipe the lost phone and when you get your new one all of your information will be downloaded to it when we hook it up to the Exchange server.  Your mail, contacts, calendar will all come back just like it was before! 

In the past only enterprise businesses could afford this technology, but independent professionals were trying to leverage the technology more than anyone else.  Several years ago the industry responded to this overwhelming demand, and many new service providers have catered to this niche.  Enter the Hosted Exchange provider.  There’s no server for you to purchase, just pay month by month for only the space and mailboxes you use.  All of the system maintenance and backup is done for you.  It’s a completely managed solution.  It’s easy to setup and even easier to use.  This type of system is probably the single most time-saving and useful piece of technology I use and I leverage it constantly.

© 2010 Engler Information Technologies, Inc.

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