Visto to offer Exchange, Notes e-mail on iPhone

June 28, 2007, 07:12 PM —  IDG News Service — 

Push e-mail provider Visto Corp. says it will be able to send enterprise e-mail to iPhones starting later this year.

Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino e-mail users will be able to send and receive messages on the iPhone, either as an individual user or on a corporatewide basis. Apple Inc.'s much-hyped iPhone goes on sale on Friday.

Individual users will download an application to their PCs. As e-mail messages arrive, that application transfers them from the PC to Visto's network operation center and then on to the user's iPhone. Users will automatically receive the e-mail in the standard client software that comes with the iPhone, said Haniff Somani, vice president and chief architect at Visto.

Users must leave the PC on for the e-mail messages to reach their iPhone. To set up the service, a user will enter Visto's server address into the IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) application on the phone, he said. IMAP is a standard messaging protocol.

An enterprise could also buy server software that would push e-mail out to all the iPhone users in the company in a process that works in a similar way to the PC application.

Early reviewers of the iPhone have written that users will be able to receive Exchange e-mails on the phone, but Somani pointed out some reasons that might not be a popular idea at enterprises. In order to push Exchange e-mail to the iPhone directly, IT administrators would have to open a hole in their firewall that allows the IMAP data to flow back and forth, he said. That can be dangerous, since that opens a door to potentially malicious activities.

Analysts agreed. "IMAP is not something they want to open up," said Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "Most enterprises, when they hear that, say 'There's no way I'm doing that.'"

In addition, the direct IMAP services usually have poor performance, he said.

With Visto's service, the enterprise doesn't have to open the IMAP port because the Visto server resides behind the firewall, Somani said.

Ideally, Apple would license Microsoft's ActiveSync in order to support Exchange e-mail on the phones in a more robust and secure way, Dulaney said. That's how Nokia Corp., for example, supports push e-mail to certain devices, he said.

He suggests that enterprises may be wary of the Visto offering because Visto is associated with mobile operator-based services and enterprises don't always trust operators with such services. In this case, Visto is hosting the network operations center itself but must still work with AT&T Inc., which has said it will enable IMAP in its network for the service, Visto said.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
peer-to-peer

jfruh
Apple syncing patent can't come soon enough

pasmith
New Twitter features borrow from 3rd party clients

Esther Schindler
Open Source Changes the Software Acquisition Process

mikelgan
How to set up continuous podcast play on the new iTunes

David Strom
Five important Windows 7 mobility features

sjvn
Guard your Wi-Fi for your own sake                        

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Grepping on Whole Words

 

Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace