Mobile Email Solutions Using Push Email And Pim Synchronization

1. An Introduction to Mobile Email
While the complexity and requirements that large scale solutions must achieve have greatly increased during the last few years, a growing number of service providers have also started to include support for enterprise functionalities in order to better meet and adapt to their customers’ ever changing messaging needs.

With email quickly becoming the primary means of communication for both corporate and individual users, the competition in the market also gets tougher every day. Consequently, a new breed of email services has to be appended to already existing portfolios in order to attract new customers and keep current service subscribers happy. This is where offering mobile email functionalities such as the Push technology or PIM database synchronization can make the difference.

2. Push Email and PIM Synchronization
Instant access to messages, contacts, calendar, or tasks regardless of time and location makes it easier for mobile workers to manage business operations, to stay in touch with customers and partners, and abreast of the latest changes and events on the market. It also ensures a better balance between professional and personal lives, enabling frequent travelers to keep in close contact with family and friends at all times. As a result, instant email retrieval has become more and more popular in both business and personal communication environments.

Smartphones and PDAs have also raised the bar in this sense and personal information management along with wireless (GPRS, 3G etc.) email access are visibly embraced by a fast-growing community of users. This is a known fact and the trend seems to pick up the pace with each month.

How It Works: Email and PIM synchronization is the next best thing in email since the invention of the IMAP protocol. Through a technology, now known as "Push Email", the tables have turned on email servers and clients. Normally, the client (desktop or mobile) would connect to the server and log in with the account credentials. Once the authentication is complete the client would poll the account by asking the server if any new messages are available.

As opposed to this, Push email instructs the server to instantly notify the client when a new email arrives. The main difference between these two approaches consists in the fact that the server will always know when a new message exists, while the client does not and has to check for them in a timely fashion. Push email is also much more economic in terms of data transfer amount and bandwidth usage. Establishing a single connection and maintaining it in an idle state is a very relaxed way to help the server contact the client whenever required.

Almost the same thing happens when speaking about PIM database synchronization. Appointments, tasks, notes and all of the data stored as PIM information are translated into email objects formatted in a special way, so that the contents can later be interpreted appropriately. So both emails and PIM data rely on the same standard and look a lot alike, despite some major differences that will not be detailed in the present whitepaper. What needs to be remembered is that from an email server’s perspective, the above mentioned objects are considered emails in the general meaning of the word.

3. AXIGEN Mobility Services
At this time, quite a lot of PIM sync and email pushing technologies exist and they are all implemented differently, even though they perform the same task. By far, the most popular technology, used world-wide, is Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol. Therefore, AXIGEN has chosen to first implement support for this specific technology in order to reach and provide this feature to the largest base of users possible. The series of mobile devices and handsets that support the ActiveSync protocol includes Nokia / SymbianOS devices, Windows Mobile (since 2003 up to latest version), Apple iPhone and other devices that can have compatible software installed.

To continue to read this whitepaper, please visit: Mobile Email Solutions Using Push Email & PIM Synchronization Alternatively, we also invite you to join our live webinar: Mobility Services for Medium and Large Scale Solutions

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