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Q1 |
How can I minimise the cost of having Direct Push email? |
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A1 |
There are 3 elements to the cost of having Direct Push
email:-
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The Cost of the Smartphone
The real cost of these devices is £175 to £400 but, if you buy it from a mobile
operator and take out an air-time contract at the same
time, which commits you to on-going monthly payments, the
mobile operator is likely to subsidise up to 100% of the
purchase cost of the phone on the assumption that your monthly
payments will more than compensate for this subsidy.
In any case, purchasing a Smartphone is a one off
payment and so it may be a false economy
to choose the cheapest phone as the other costs involved
with Direct Push are the same whether you have a deluxe or bargain Smartphone.
Finding a Smartphone that you're going to be happy
with is the most difficult part of this process. |
2 - |
An Exchange Mailbox to provide Direct Push Functionality
If your company has its own Exchange
server then this is easy - just make sure it's, at
least, Exchange 2003 with service pack 2.
Otherwise companies and individuals can rent a Direct
Push enabled Exchange mailbox.
At Arrowmail we charge £7.99/month for our standard
mailbox which will suit most people.
If we're not the cheapest then we won't be far off, so the cost of an Exchange mailbox
isn't an area where you're going to find ways of
reducing the overall cost of Direct Push email. |
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Mobile Data Charges
This is where you'll feel the sting of push email the
most.
Data charges are way too expensive with a
standard rate of £2/megabyte.
As it's not easy to
keep track of what you're spending until your monthly
bill arrives, this can come as a shock.
For Direct Push email to work, the connection
between your Smartphone and the Exchange server must be active
all the time to allow Exchange to initiate a "push" to
your device, without delay, when required.
GPRS and 3G mobile connections only charge
for data sent and received and not the amount of time
you're connected, thank goodness.
Also Direct Push is designed to use
the minimum amount of data when nothing's happening.
Even
so, you should expect Direct Push to consume between
25mb and 40mb of data transfer per month.
So you'll need
a data plan to avoid paying £2 for each megabyte.
If
Direct Push costs you only £15/month in data charges
then you've got off lightly and using Direct Push while
roaming overseas is horrendously expensive - see the next question.
Growing numbers of mobile data users, competition
between networks and EU regulation are starting to bring
these charges down and pretty soon you may only need to
pay an extra £5/month for your data charges.
Check out T-Mobile's
Web'n'Walk package.
There's more about the steps you can take to minimise your
mobile data use here. |
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Q2 |
Can I use Direct Push when I go overseas? |
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A2 |
Yes, in most countries, but at a price.
When we go overseas on business trips or
holidays we accept that our next monthly mobile bill will be,
perhaps 50% higher than normal
and try to reduce the number and length of calls we make and
receive, and even use alternatives like Skype.
Mobile Networks offer voice and text deals for going overseas to encourage
mobile phone use while keeping costs down.
While the GPRS and 3G connections, required for Direct Push
email, will work automatically in most countries, the cost you'll be
paying per megabyte of data transferred is a minimum of £5,
typically £8 and if your Smartphone locks onto a non-preferred network, £20 or more.
Last time I checked, only Vodafone was offering a data
package that included use overseas and that was £90/month, which was the USA.
Should you use Direct Push email while overseas?
The other costs involved with business trips - air-fares,
taxis, hotels and eating out - make £20/day for mobile data look
like a trivial amount.
If the benefits of Direct Push email are
likely to assist you in the success of your business trip then of course you must use it.
However, for holidays and business trips where Direct Push
email is not essential, the sense of being ripped off will
probably make you reluctant to use it.
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Q3 |
How can I stop my Smartphone alerting me to unimportant emails? |
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A3 |
Use an email system with a good spam filter
and then setup Rules from within Outlook, on your PC, to automatically divert emails you don't want to read
on your Smartphone, to other folders in your mailbox where you
can read them later from a Desktop PC.
There's more information about using Rules
here.
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Q4 |
What can I do to safeguard the information on my Smartphone if it's been lost or stolen? |
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A4 |
Use the Customer Request Form
to let us know your Smartphone has been lost and we'll queue
your device for a Remote Wipe.
When Exchange initiates a
Remote Wipe of a mobile device it erases all user data, extra programs and configuration information to set
it back to it's factory state.
Microsoft chose not to make the Remote Wipe process erase the
contents of any memory card inserted in the Smartphone, however,
with Windows Mobile 6 you can choose to encrypt the contents of the memory card.
The Smartphone obviously has to be turned on, connected to the Internet
and attempting to synchronise with the Exchange server for it to
receive it's self-destruct order.
Here's what appears on the Smartphone's screen when it receives such an order:-
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The question in this pop-up rates as the most disingenuous
of all the questions asked in Microsoft products.
It really
means "is it OK to wipe everything on your device?"
Of course,
the question is being asked of the person who's stolen your
Smartphone and the idea is to encourage this person to select
"OK" so that your personal information on the Smartphone can be
erased.
Maybe the question shouldn't be asked and the wipe
just go ahead anyway.
Back at the mother-ship, the
news of a successful Remote Wipe is greeted with cheers all round:-
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If a lost Smartphone is found, the Remote Wipe order has to
be cancelled on the Exchange server otherwise, when a
device that has already been wiped once attempts to re-connect
to Exchange (a process which requires a valid username and password to be
supplied) a second Remote Wipe will be initiated.
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Q5 |
How can I get Direct Push working on my Smartphone which isn't a Windows Mobile 5 or 6 device? |
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A5 |
Many non-Windows Smartphones come with their
own ActiveSync client to allow them to operate with an Exchange server.
ActiveSync doesn't mean the same as Direct Push. In fact
ActiveSync, which has been around for numerous years, only got
the ability to perform Direct Push in October 2005 so it's
important to find out if the non-Windows ActiveSync client has Direct Push ability.
If your built-in software won't work, there's a 3rd party
Direct Push client called RoadSync from
DataViz which
costs US$99. They make a version for almost every type of
Smartphone including earlier version of Windows Mobile.
Another program that DataViz sell, that's worth mentioning
here, is
Documents To Go which allows you to work with Microsoft Word and Excel documents.
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Q6 |
I've enabled new message notification on my
Smartphone but it only works sometimes. What's wrong? |
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A6 |
You may be leaving your Mobile Outlook open and
displayed on your Smartphone. This disables alerts for new email
on the assumption that you must be looking at the screen and
so will see when a new email arrives.
It's very easy just to
leave your Inbox displayed, the phone go into power-saving and you
put it into your pocket.
If this happens, although new emails are still being
pushed to your Smartphone, you won't be alerted to their arrival.
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Q7 |
How do I delete an Exchange server ActiveSync connection on my Smartphone? |
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A7 |
It may be staring you in the face but
sometimes you just can't see how to do it!
On your Smartphone, open ActiveSync and go to Menu -
Options and on the next screen that appears select Delete:-
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Q8 |
With Direct Push working, do I still need
to use ActiveSync to synchronise with my PC? |
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A8 |
ActiveSync is a Microsoft program that's been
evolving over numerous years and was up to version 4.5 the last
time I looked.
It started as a way to transfer items between a
PC and a PDA, mostly to keep your contacts in sync.
Later, you were able use it to synchronise all
Outlook data between your PC's copy of Outlook and the one on your PDA.
The next step was to allow the PDA to synchronise "over the
air" directly with an Exchange server.
When this was working
reliably, there was no longer any need to synchronise your PDA's
email data with a PC as both PC and PDA would now be
synchronising directly with the server
Initially this PDA/Exchange synchronisation was user-initiated and it took a
false start by Microsoft of using SMS text messages to alert a
Smartphone of new email, before the current Direct Push system came into being.
The answer to this question, therefore, is that you don't need
to setup an ActiveSync relationship between your Smartphone and
PC for anything to do with email but there are still several good reasons to set one up:-
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To install a new program on your Smartphone usually
requires running an installation program on a PC which
then initiates the installation, through the ActiveSync
connection, on the Smartphone itself. |
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The ActiveSync connection is a useful way to
transfers files back-and-forth between a PC and Smartphone.
Such a file might be your Active Directory
Root digital certificate which the Smartphone needs to
enable Direct Push from your Exchange server. |
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A Smartphone can usually get Internet access through
the ActiveSync connection and then via the PC's
connection which, if you're sat at your desk for a long
period, can save on mobile data costs.
Doing this
occasionally will synchronise your Smartphone's clock
with a reference time source and you can synchronise
other things such as Internet Explorer's Favourites. |
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Your can backup your Smartphone's data and
configuration settings to your PC. |
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Q9 |
I've followed your instructions but I just
can't get Direct Push to work. Any suggestions? |
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A9 |
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Make sure your Smartphone is connected to the
Internet by opening a webpage in Internet Explorer. This is a
good page to use as a test:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile
Although a Smartphone is supposed to get an Internet
connection through the ActiveSync connection with a PC, it
doesn't always work and it's really only important that
it can access the Internet using 3G/GPRS and perhaps
WiFi. |
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Make sure that you can connect to our server and
you're using the correct username and password.
See if you
can access your email using OMA by opening the browser
on your Smartphone and going to:-
https://exchange.arrowmail.co.uk/oma |
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Try setting up Microsoft's PDA Emulator on your PC
which is a free program that simulates a Smartphone on
your PC's screen.
This virtual PDA is fully
functional except that you can't make phone calls
however ActiveSync and Direct Push work just like a real one.
If Direct Push works on the virtual Smartphone then
the problem's likely to be with your real Smartphone and
you can compare settings between the two.
Details of how to install and setup a virtual
Smartphone are here. |
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Arrowmail's servers use a commercial digital
certificate from Thawte which Smartphones are set to
trust by default.
If you are trying to get Direct Push
to work with another server you may need to import the
root certificate which that server is using, into your
Smartphone's Trusted Root Certificate store. |
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Q10 |
My Inbox is kept synchronised on my Smartphone
but my Sent Items folder is empty.
How can I keep my Sent Items folder synchronised as well? |
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A10 |
By default, these are the only folders that are synchronised on your
Smartphone:-
Inbox,
Calendar
Contacts
Tasks
You can add as many of your other email folders as you like
so long as your SmartPhone has enough memory to store them all.
Usually SmartPhones can only hold a subset of your complete
mailbox which would be all your more recent items.
Instructions for adding extra folders are
here.
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