Posts Tagged ‘Windows Mobile’

Windows Mobile 6.5 Touch Gestures

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Although I now have an iPhone, I have to admit I’ve always quite like Windows Mobile.  It may be a bit clunky compared to Apple’s newer toys, but I’ve had WM phones since the original Orange SPV years ago.

Anyways, I’ve been keeping an eye on how the new version, Windows Mobile 6.5, has been developing.  I managed to have a play with a phone running 6.5 a few months ago and was actually quite impressed.  While you could tell the old WM was underneath, the touch interface was a great improvement on the old home screen, and it felt modern – even next to the iPhone.

I was just going though my rss feeds and noticed this new post from Marcus Perryman over at Microsoft.  He’s written quite an in depth article about how 6.5 implements touch and the gestures you use to navigate and do things.  It’s pretty techie (don’t say I didn’t warn you!), but quite interesting if you’re into that stuff.

Marcus also points out the official touch gesture docs have been published and can be found here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee220920.aspx

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Clients for Office Communications Server

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

I’ve been doing a bit of work recently to figure out what would be needed to move from current Live Communications Server (LCS) setup to Office Communications Server (OCS).  Part of this has been to think about what clients are available for the various platforms people might be using.

I thought it might be useful to post up a quick summary of what I’ve found.

Windows

Windows is obviously the primary platform that OCS is designed to work with.  To that end it has the most feature rich clients.

Office Communicator 2007 R2
Office Communicator 2007 is the main client for OCS.  It is the most feature rich client available and includes support for the full range of OCS’s capabilities:

Instant Messaging
Presence
Enhanced Presence
Assess Levels
PIC Connectivity
File Transfer
1:1 Voice and Video
Multiparty Voice and Video
Live Meeting sessions
Call Management Features
Remote Call Control
VoIP
Office Integration
Calendar Free/Busy
Conversation History

Office Communicator 2005
Office Communicator 2005 is the original client for LCS.  Whilst most people will move to MOC 2007, if you’re migrating from LCS during the rollout it might be necessary to have some people using the older client. 

Whist MOC 2005 will work with OCS and OCS R2, there are some limitations.  If you enable Enhanced Presence for the MOC 2005 users in OCS then they won’t be able to connect – as I understand it this is also something that can’t be undone once the user has also logged into MOC 2007.  Also if you’re running OCS R2 you’ll also need to install the December 2008 hotfix package.

Once you have it working, you have access to most of OCS functionality, but updated features like enhanced presence aren’t available.

Apple Mac

Messenger for Mac 7.0.2
If you’re a Mac user, MS provide a pretty decent OCS client in the form of Messenger for Mac.  As well as supporting Live Messenger, this support various flavours of LCS and OCS, with the recent 7.0.2 version and later supporting OCS 2007 R2.

Messenger for Mac supports the majority of OCS and Office Communicator features, including things that were missing from previous versions such as audio and video conferencing, Enhanced Presence, GAL search, and support for federated users.  In fact the only major items not available are support for LiveMeeting sessions, VoIP support and Access Levels for presence.

One thing to note, is that once a user has been enabled for enhanced presence and has logged in using Messenger for Mac 7, they won’t then be able to use version 6 or earlier.

Macs can also use the Web Client described below.

Messenger for Mac can be found here:

Messenger for Mac site

and the product team have provided some good documentation for it here:

Messenger for Mac Deployment Guide

Web Client

Office Communicator Web Access
Communicator Web Access provides a web based interface into OCS for remote workers.  It provides the core functionality of IM and Presence, but OCS R2 extends that functionality significantly.

With R2, web users can use Desktop Sharing sessions.  If you are on a Windows computer then you can launch, view and control sessions, if you’re on a Mac or Linux based box then you’ll only be able to view and take control of a session.

What’s more, if you have telephony configured within your OCS environment, web users can also initiate, receive and control audio conferences.  By providing a the number of a telephone they can use, OCS dials in that phone and connects it to a conference hosted on the A/V Conferencing server.  If an incoming call is received whilst a users is connected to the web client they can use it to redirect the call to an alternative phone.

Another interesting new feature is the ability to provide a Web Client to people who aren’t part of your organisation so that they can join conferences/conversations.  There’s an ‘invite using email’ function that will send them a specific URL that will launch a web client session and join them into the converation.

There are a few other additions with R2 such as the ability to use distribution groups for messages, and support for customising the logon pages with company logos etc.

Windows Mobile

Communicator Mobile (CoMo)
For Windows Mobile MS is provided a pretty decent communicator client, and then improved it further with the R2 release.

CoMo supports all the usual IM and presence functionality, including communication with PIC contacts and distribution groups.  It provides access to the corporate address book, and lets the user initial phone calls to numbers held within it.

The R2 version has a number of improvements to the client, as well as some improvements in interaction with an R2 backend.

On the client side there are a few usability improvements like access to recent contacts and expanding distribution lists.  The R2 version is also a lot more efficient in terms of network usage which contributes to vastly improved battery life over the previous version.

One big advance is the on the voice integration with OCS.  When using the CoMo client to make calls, the client uses the OCS infrastructure to make calls, potentially saving call costs.  It also allows for single number reach, with calls to an OCS desk phone will ring the mobile and will be answerable on the mobile.

When working with an R2 backend presence is also a lot smarter for people using more than one client – for example people with a CoMo phone and OC on their computer.  OCS will determine the most recent activity and use the presence from that device.

CoMo can be downloaded from a Windows Mobile device here.

Apple iPhone

For while now I’ve been keeping an eye out for an OCS client for the Apple iPhone.  As yet I’ve not managed to find an equivalent to Windows Mobiles CoMo, but does appear to be a solution out there if you really have to have one.

WebMessenger seems to provide an iPhone version of their client, though it does looks like you need to install their WebMessenger Server Platform alongside OCS/LCS in order to use it.  So ultimately it’s not that useful.

It looks like the client supports IM, Presence and contact lists, but the information on the website doesn’t go into any detail.

Update:  Since originally writing this post, Modality Systems have released a full iPhone client for OCS.  I’ve written some more on this client here.

RIM Blackberry

Blackberry Client for OCS
If you use Blackberry’s in your organisation RIM has provided a client for OCS.  It provides presence and IM capabilities, though does not support any audio or video conferencing.  It does however integrate into the other Blackberry applications, so you can set your presence from the Home screen, and will show the presence of contract directly from the phones address book.  The client also used the phones spellchecker in IM messages and allows links and phone numbers in messages to be clicked and followed/dialled.

There is also an application that supports the older Live Communications Server.

The application is available here.

Mobile Phones

Office Communicator Mobile for Java
To provide OCS to a wider range of mobile devices the OCS team have now released a Java version of the CoMo client which supports the Nokia S40 and S60 and the Motorola RAZR V3 (though others may work).

The client provides much of the same functionality as the Windows Mobile client, including IM, Presence address book access and single number reach.

Further details can be found here and here, and you can download it onto you phone from getcomo.com.

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Smartphone and iPhone polices in Exchange

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

There’s a lot of well deserved buzz about the Exchange 2010 announcements today, but unfortunately this post is more about the present day versions!

I’ve had a few conversations over the past few weeks about managing mobile devices like smartphones and iPhones.  Many companies now have a lot of phones and PDA’s being used to access email, calendars and contacts.  Now I think this is great news, having consistent access to my calendar and contacts from all my phones is fantastic.  From a company perspective though it can pose some challenges. 

With all those devices wandering around the countryside with copies of mailboxes, attachments, address books etc on them, the risk of loosing something important increases.  So how do you go about managing the things?

Fortunately there are quite a few people out there who can help.  There are a number of products out there that will manage phones, PDA’s smartphones etc.  Some will manage just specific devices and others will look after anything that’s even slightly intelligent.  Depending on your size, you can probably also get these as a managed service from people like Brightpoint, so no need to buy kit of your own. 

These dedicated solutions offer a fantastic amount of control over remote devices, including software distribution even remote control.  But the costs do add up. 

If you’re using Microsoft Exchange and Activesync, another option is to look at the management options that they provide out the box.  Since Exchange 2003 you’ve been able to apply polices to devices that connect to Exchange for mail.  This has the advantage that you can apply policies to all devices that connect to Exchange, including those that might be personal phones (of course you’d need to warn people!).

Whilst Exchange doesn’t offer quite the same level of control as something like Mobile Device Manager or mProdigy, for some it will offer enough for free that the dedicated solutions aren’t necessary.

When this subject first came up at work last year I put this table together that shows what options are available from Exchange 2003 through to Exchange 2007 SP1, and on Windows Mobile and iPhone.  The info came from quite a few places, but I can’t remember exactly where so sorry if anyone recognises a bit of it as theirs! 

Unfortunately the table is too big too wide post here directly, but here’s  a copy of the spreadsheet with the info:

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‘What will be the most widely adopted Enterprise Mobile Device in 2009?’

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

A few people have written about this over the last few days but I thought I’d mention a few things I’ve not seen mentioned elsewhere.

LinkedInPoll

Over on LinkedIn there’s a Poll asking the question ‘What will be the widestly adopted Enterprise Mobile Device in 2009?’.  Although not that scientific (there’s no accounting for whether the respondents are actually in a position to assess or influence the matter) it does pose some interesting questions, for example is the iPhone ready for widespread enterprise adoption?

I reckon it is, but within limits.  For people that just want a smartphone that will access their mailbox, calendar, contacts and the web then I reckon the iPhone does a fantastic job.  It’s not perfect by any means, but for your average  user it’s fine.  It does pretty much everything Windows Mobile can do but with a tad more style, and without the extra infrastructure/services a Blackberry solution would need.

What’s more, by supporting Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol not only does it play nicely with Exchange, it also supports Exchange’s basic device management capabilities (enforce pin codes, remote wipe etc).  That support makes the iPhone a lot more acceptable to corporate IS departments – quite how many use device management is another matter…

Of course if you have existing mobile applications you need to support then the iPhone may not fit quite yet.  But business apps are starting to trickle through onto the App Store (Salesforce, Oracle) and with Apples simple model for publishing and distribution I’m sure many more will follow. 

To me though the key thing the iPhone has in its favour are the end users.  Ultimately to most people, phones and smartphones – even their work ones – are personal devices.  And even as a long time Windows Mobile user I have to say that the iPhone walks all over it’s competition as a phone everyone can use and enjoy. 

I’m still looking forward to seeing Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7.0 though… :)

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Office Communications Server client for iPhone

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

I’m on an Office Communication Server (OCS) course this week so I was just doing a bit of digging around to see what clients are available. 

For Windows there are the usual Office Communicator and Live Meeting clients that will be used by the vast majority of users.  There’s also Messenger for Mac which provides access on Apple clients,  and supports all the IM and conferencing functionality.  For Windows Mobile phones the Communicator Mobile client does presence, IM and integration with the telephoney side of OCS. 

Until today I hadn’t really looked into what other clients were out there.  One interesting one I found is called WebMessenger and provides an LCS and OCS client for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symian, Palm and apparently the iPhone.  It sounds great at first glace, but it seems like it requries additional backend components (I could be wrong, I’ve not gone into any detail).  Not really ideal, quite what they’re doing over and above the standard OCS edge roles I’m not sure.  But, if you need an iPhone or Blackberry client it might be worth a look.

With MS’s recent moves to make their products a little more platform independent, hopefully they’ll port Communicator Mobile to the iPhone at some point.  Whether Apple and the networks will want them to enable all the VoIP telephoney features I don’t know, but just contacts, presence and IM would be useful.

Update:  Since this post another OCS client for iPhone has been released, I’ve written an updated article about it here: iDialog Office Communications Server Client for iPhone

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Google Androids breaking Windows

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Since T-Mobile launched the first Google Android based phone a few weeks ago I’ve read a few good pieces about the both the phone itself and the overall platform.  I find it interesting that pretty much all the articles and blogs compare Android directly with the iPhone.  From what I’ve seen it’s more an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. 

I’m sure some of this is due to the current iPhone and Apple buzz, but I don’t think the WM comparison is something we can ignore.  For one thing Android is a platform rather than a ‘product’.  Where as the iPhone is a complete product – hardware, OS, applications and services, Android is very similar to Windows Mobile in that its a platform you can adopt for your hardware or apps. 

It strikes me that Android is a lot like Chome in that I imagine its seen as a vehicle for the delivery of Googles cloud services.  Although I don’t think Google have really chased the Enterprise market in the past they seem to be building up this side of their business, putting in place the building blocks they will need to move in and squash MS.  There’s a lot of money to be made in the enterprise email and office apps market and Google seem to be chasing that cash with a bit more vigor these days.

Googles enterprise email offerings are very competitive.  On price alone they are hard to ignore.  You loose some of the functionality you get with something like Exchange and Outlook, but especially in todays market, it does put you in a place where you start wondering about whether the functionality is worth the extra cost. 

One gap in the email offering seems to be mobile services.  Services like Blackberry and WM push mail are ubiquitous in business today and will be important for business adoption.  Sure there’s a mobile GoogleMail site, and a client for Blackberry but having their own platform out there that can do push mail, run the core Google apps and provide a platform for third party apps is a very attractive piece of the overall solution.

The fact that few articles are comparing Andoid to WM really surprises me.  And if I was a WM product manager I’d be both happy and worried about that.  Happy because the market seems to be pitching Android against Apple.  Worried because no one is talking about my product.

Edit:  I just spotted a great review of the T-Mobile G1 and Android over on Engadget that gives a good description of Androids integration with the Google cloud.

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First impressions of an iPhone newbie

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

After a few weeks waiting, O2 finally shipped an iPhone 3G to me on Tuesday, so I’ve spent a good few hours fiddling with it over the past few days.  I thought I’d post up a few thoughts, really for my own benefit in keening some notes.

Compared to the Windows Mobile phones I’m used to, the iPhone setup, activation and registration was a real mess… With pretty much every other phone I’ve used you put in the sim, turn it on and that’s it.  I’m really not keen on this requirement to register the phone with iTunes before it can be used. 

For consumers it’s probably ok, but in an Enterprise do you really want to install iTunes on your (probably) managed desktops?  Personally I can do without iTunes and its MobileMe adverts etc for a work phone.  I’m reasonably sure I won’t be the only one either.  To be honest I don’t even bother with ActiveSync these days and just do everything over the air.  Apparently O2 have some managed services that might help here, and I’ll be looking at them as soon as possible.

The other slight problem was with O2, they managed to incorrectly activate the sim’s or something that lead to a 24 hour delay in activation.  It was only with the inside knowledge of our service manager here that we managed to identify and fix the problem.  Hopefully this was a one off issue with the two iPhones and sim’s they sent over, but if I’d been an end user I would not have been happy as O2 were initially insisting everything was fine and we had registered the phones incorrectly.

Now it’s all working though, I have to say the device itself is great.  Quite a few people have told me that it’s slower and less responsive than the original, but as a new user it seems fine to me.

The apps all work well, and the browsing experience is much better than on Windows mobiles – with the possible exception of the Opera browser on the HTC Touch Diamond. 

I’m also impressed with the App Store.  I found some great apps for twitter and Facebook, and I can’t wait to see what else appears over the next few months. 

Back to the work stuff… the setup of Exchange ActiveSync was nice and easy, and the interface for mail and calendars is nice to use.  It’s be good to see tasks etc added in, but I can live without those for now.

Although I’ve played with the configuration tools, I’ve not applied any profiles yet.  I’ll be doing that over the next few weeks though.

The big omission in my mind is the ability to set a window where push email is activated.  On my Windows phones I have push setup between 7am and 6pm and manual syncs during the evenings and weekends.  I find this is not only useful for separating work from home, but also saving battery life and data charges.

Speaking of battery life… Oh dear.  Now I’m not really a heavy user.  On my other phones I usually keep wifi and bluetooth off, just keeping email pushing down and doing the occasional bit of browsing.  Usually I go a day or two between charges on my S620. 

When I got the iPhone 2 days ago it was charged more or less all day – in that is was plugged into my laptop while we sorted out the activation problems.  Yesterday I turned it on at about 10am and it was dead by 3.30pm.  Admittedly I was busy playing with it and trying stuff out.  So I got home and charged it up again and turned it off over night. 

This morning I turned it on at 8.30ish to try out hahlo.com (a great twitter app)… looking at the usage stats it’s been on for 2 hour’s 33 minutes and I’m at ~40% battery.  Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS and everything else apart from 3G and push are off.  That’s really not good.  At all.

I’ve read that the battery life improves after a few charge cycles… if not, as much as I like it – and despite the the little problems I really do like it – I’ll have to send it back… if it can’t last a full day between charges its really no use to me :(

So overall… I really really like the iPhone 3G.  the interface and user experience is much nicer than the standard Windows Mobile phones I’m used to.  I’d like to spend some more time with a Touch Diamond as a comparison, but overall it’s streets ahead.  I’d also like to loose the iTunes requirement – in an Enterprise I just don’t think that’s on.  But… the battery life so far is a killer problem.  As it stands today, mine will be dead by noon.  But I do really like it. Lots.

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HTC Touch Diamond – First thoughts

Friday, July 4th, 2008

3-4_left_weatherYesterday I got a HTC Touch Diamond to play with for a few days.  I’ve been wanting to see one in the flesh for a while, partly because I need a new phone, and partly because we’re a Windows Mobile house here and with the 3G iPhone looming we’re thinking hard about future direction.

The Diamond… well it’s a sight to behold.   The phone itself is tiny, with sharp styling and is very lightweight.  One comment I heard yesterday was that it makes any phone you sit it next to look 10 years old.  I like the look of it a lot.  The rear surface (as you’ve probably seen in photos) isn’t flat, it has slightly raised jagged pattern that makes it look like it’s been cut from stone, or well… diamond.

The small size of the device poses some interesting question.  Previously WM Smartphones used to be the smaller option, sacrificing the touch screen for a smaller footprint.  Now however, this full WM device with all the GPS and stuff is small enough that it doesn’t matter.  I’m not sure what future the Smartphone OS has if devices are now this small.

Powering the thing up, the first think I noticed was the quality of the screen, off hand I’m not sure what the resolution is, but I’ve seen desktop LCD monitors with worse picture quality, it’s very very good.  This allows the interface to use small, sharp fonts without them being hard to see or use. 

The main ‘home screen’ interface is miles ahead of any other Windows Mobile phone I’ve used (and that’s quite a few!).  At the bottom there’s a scroll bar of buttons for the main functions (contacts, photos, music, settings etc) that is easy to use and and quite intu itive once you realise it’s there.  You just move your finger across the screen until you reach what you want, for example photos, the bulk of the screen is used to show previews that you can then scroll through.  It’s all great looking and reasonably well thought out.

In fact, in terms of the user interface I’d say the worst thing was the underlying Windows OS.  Once you find a function or task that isn’t covered by the HTC installed user interface, the jolt of going back to the old Windows Mobile interface is quite shocking.  I’ve always got on quite well with WM before, but the Diamond really does highlight that MS need to start concentrating on the ‘Mobile’ part of their OS not the ‘Windows’ part.  The normal windows like GUI just doesn’t cut it in the mobile space anymore.

Would I buy one?  Not sure… If there wasn’t a 3G iPhone just days away then yes, without a doubt.  As it is I’ll wait and see.

 

Touch_Diamond_Music Touch_Diamond_Back

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Dashwire – Mobile Synchronisation

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Spotted a nice new service over over on Jason Langridge’s Blog.  Dashwire syncs Windows Mobile (and soon Symbian apparently) phones and PDA’s with a web service. 

I’ve only just signed up but it looks pretty cool.  It runs a client on the device that syncs all your basic phone info (contacts, bookmarks, SMS’s etc) as well as integrating with services like Flickr and Facebook  for photos.  Interestingly it can also post status updates (and other Tweeting goodness) to Twitter.

The killer bit of functionality for me is the ability to Sync configuration from device to device.  I’ve not tested it yet, but I change my phone loads as I get to test out new toys devices for work, so this could save me loads of time.

Check it out over on dashwire.com

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