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
£7.99/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 useful sized keyboards and screens into
a stylish, featherwieght phone that goes a week between charges.
You have to accept it: if you want Push Email, your Smartphone 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.
I've currently got a shirtpocket-friendly Palm Treo 500V

Smartphones, based on Windows Mobile 5 or 6, 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:-

1 -	Storing all your Contact information.
2 -	Providing a calendar to enter your appointments which generates reminders as they approach or are overdue.
3 -	Allows you to keep a "To Do" list and gives a warning when a task's completion date is approaching.

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

1 -	Emails addressed to info@, support@, sales@ etc. can each go to their own Public Folder where a group of users can deal with them instead of just going to one individual where there's the risk of it not being seen if that person is away on holiday. General interest emails, such as newsletters, can go to a Public Folder where they can be automatically deleted after, say, 30 days.
2 -	If you grant access to your calendar to an assistant, they can make any additions or changes for you, while you're away, which you'll pick up when you next check email remotely.
3 -	Meetings can be arranged by allowing others to see your free/busy status and sending meeting requests through Outlook. Meeting rooms can also be booked using Outlook.

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 connection 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.
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 3 years and, although my emails are now 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.

The honest answer, which applies to anyone else offering on-line storage for files, is:-
To a certain extent, Yes, but it's nowhere near as comprehensive a solution as
what we offer for email.

The problem is the time it takes to transfer a file over a Broadband Internet connection.
A short letter or typical spreadsheet may take less than 20 seconds but the movie you're editing of your holidays might take 2 weeks!

Standard emails, by contrast, are very small files and attachments usually don't exceed 10mb so email copes well with Broadband speeds and, over slower connections, only an email's tiny header is downloaded until you request to open the email itself.
There are no such tricks with on-line files.

If you know, roughly, the size of the files you're working with and roughly the
speed of the Internet connection you're using, on-line file storage can be a very useful way of making a sub-set of your files - the current ones and those you use all the time - available wherever everywhere you go and safely backed up on our servers.

2 gigabytes is the standard amounts of on-line storage we provide which you can share between email data and file storage.
You can also buy additional storage at £1 / 500mb / month.

As well as folders for people's exclusive personal use, companies can have shared on-line folders with built-in arbitration of who's currently got editing rights.

We have 2 separate methods of on-line storage, both of which are enabled on all accounts:-

1 -	FreeDocs, where you save files right inside Outlook
2 -	Web Folders, where on-line files are shown in a folder on your Desktop where you work with them in a similar way to locally stored files.

You can make automatic, overnight off-site backups to your on-line storage space where file transfer time is not so important.
This has to be done intelligently, though, as uploading more than 500mb a day is impractical.
Also some files, like the Exchange Mailstore files, are unsuitable for off-site backup because they and big and constantly changing.

FTP access to Web Folders is also enabled if you prefer this.

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!