Microsoft DirectPush

Well, I think I may count myself as one of the first pioneers who have installed AKU2 upgrade on their teleputers. Now what is that "AKU2", you will ask.... From the formal standpoint AKU2 (Adaptation Kit Update 2) is a second, updated release of the Windows Mobile 5 operating system, that powers rapidly growing number of devices from smartphones to teleputers.

It's main feature, however, is the DirectPush email delivery technology, or simply, push email. Push email is a set o technologies, delivering your emails instantly, as they arrive. From the customer's perspective it is working more or less like SMS service. Once an email message arrives on your server, the server "pushes" the message to your device. For those of you interested in the very details, there is Ewan Dalton's PowerPoint presentation from IT Forum 2005. So far email used to be a "pull" service - you had to connect to retrieve it. Push changes a lot here and you should not wonder why I kept on monitoring the i-mate's FTP Site for the update. Yes, it is not yet reflected on their web page yet, but can be downloaded and installed ;)

DirectPush is very easy to set up. Assuming you already have Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 at your office, what you need is Service Pack 2 installed on the server (our Admin is perfect with things like that :), a Windows Mobile device (i-mate JasJar in my case) with AKU2 upgrade and a working packet data connection (like GPRS or UMTS). One thing to remember is to install on the mobile device a root certificate, that secures the communication channel. Once you have everything in place, it just works. As practically this is my first personal experience with push email, I really must say the jaws drop...

I did a series of tests. Like sending an email message from my private Gmail account to my corporate Exchange account. Within 20 seconds from pressing the "Send" button on the Gmail page, the teleputer beeped and a notification message popped up. 20 seconds is very fast. I did some SMS tests to compare, and SMSes (within the same network) were typically delivered within 12 seconds. Now if you imagine that the email from Google account had to travel across the Atlantic over SMTP to my Exchange server, that in turn notifies the teleputer over a mobile packet data connection to pull the message and the device retrieves the message over the air, 20 seconds is really impressive. Bad, really bad news for the Blackberry... The push email monopoly is broken. In my opinion this feature alone may be a big driver for the adoption of Exchange servers within corporations. Microsoft DirectPush is working, working fast, over standard protocols and is secure. Both the connection is secure and, what is even more important, you are able to send/receive signed/encrypted email (S-MIME) messages very easily (to do that you have to install your personal *.PFX certificate on the device, I did this with the help of a very nice utility - PFXimprt by Jacco de Leeuw).

Unfortunately, as it happens in the industry, not all the originally planned AKU2 features found their way into the i-mate JasJar update. The feature I will be missing is the A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) Bluetooth profile. The word on the Net was A2DP implementation in AKU2 was too unstable to be officially released to the consumers. So we will have to wait at least for several months to get it. In the meantime let's push some emails ;)