It's taken a long time coming, but it's now within the budget of even the smallest company,
for individual employees to carry around with them, in their pocket, their entire business communication system.

Here's what you need and what it's likely to cost:-

Buy a SmartPhone
£0 to £400 depending on how much your mobile provider subsidises the purchase.

Buy a Monthly Mobile Data Package
£10/month - maybe less if you combine it with a call and text package or buy an
allowance for several people in your office to share.
In the UK, are offering the best deal at the moment.

Get access to a Microsoft Exchange server mailbox
£5.99/month from us.
Otherwise, is your office big enough and daring enough to run its own Exchange server?

For reading and writing emails, the bigger your SmartPhone's screen and keyboard the better.
However, they haven't found a way to squeeze a useful sized keyboard and screen into
a stylish, featherwieght phone that goes a week between charges.
You have to accept it: if you want Push Email, your phone is going to be clunkier than you'd like.
If you just want to read email, make short replies, and have no ambitions to
edit attachments, go for the smallest model with, preferably, a QWERTY keypad.
An Apple iPhone is a good choice if you can afford it and want to use other Internet services such as Google maps.
I've currently got a shirtpocket-friendly Palm Treo 500V, plus a Samsung NC10 3G-enabled Netbook in my bag for longer replies or working with attachments.

Smartphones, based on Windows Mobile 5 or 6, and the Apple iPhone versions 2 & 3, can do Direct Push with an Exchange Server "natively" but almost all Smartphones can manage Direct Push using an add-on program called RoadSync from DataViz.

Once you've tried Direct Push, if email is important to the way you do business, you'll never go back!

Outlook does more than just email, it can also organise your whole business life by:-

When people who work together use Outlook on the same Exchange server,
information can be shared so that:-

Even though you will always connect to our Exchange server over the Internet,
the advanced features still work just as if Exchange were in your office.
It's called an Outlook Anywhere connection.
All communication between Outlook and Exchange is strongly encrypted and uses the HTTPS protocol which can pass through the majority of firewalls.

Outlook's connection mechanism is optimised for working over the Internet where slowdowns and temporary dropouts are common.

Because all of your Outlook data is cached locally, you can continue to read old emails and create new ones during a connection dropout.
Outlook will keep trying to connect and, when it's re-established its connection to Exchange, it will flash a message to let you know.

At work you'll find an email you need is only on your home PC, and you'll have to keep forwarding emails from one PC to another in order to have the emails you need to hand.

You need Synchronised Email where every computer you work on shows exactly the same set of mail folders, containig exactly the same emails.
Save an email you're writing at work in Drafts and then finish it when you get home.

There are several solutions to this problem:-

Webmail, such as Hotmail
This is slow and requires you to always have an Internet connection, but will work from
any PC with an Internet connection - there's no configuration required

IMAP
A good solution for synchronised email folders if you don't use Outlook.

Microsoft Outlook in Combination with Exchange Server
The ultimate email, personal organiser and workgroup sharing solution where everything is synchronised: emails, contacts, appointments, To Do lists and even files.

Arrowmail supports all the above 3 methods of email synchronisation, at the same time!

I've been "synchronised" for over 4 years and my emails are Pushed to me as well, wherever I go, so I can't escape those reminders of all the things I've forgotten to do.
The change from unsynchronised to synchronised email was by far the biggest improvement to my email experience.

Synchronised email also means a master copy of your email data is kept safely on the server and will still be there if your PC gets lost, stolen or has a hard drive failure.

People don't talk about how reliable BMWs and Mercedes are, they mention their advanced features, their luxuries and styling.
It's just taken for granted that BMWs and Mercedes ARE very reliable and, if they weren't, the extra features that attract people to these brands would count for nothing.

Those German engineers might enjoy working of a new traction system or
engine management computer but they know that if they don't apply the same rigorous standards down through to the last nut and bolt, everything that German car design stands for will be compromised.

Direct Push and "Fully Synchronised Email" are great but, if the server's down or unresponsive when you want to use it, some emails you send don't get delivered, too much spam leaks through to your Inbox or there are too many locations where a firewall blocks your connection, then the whole system's a failure.

At Arrowmail we know this and work hard to keep the unexciting parts of email working reliably so they CAN be taken for granted.

And we don't charge "luxury car" prices!