Getting e-mail on your Smart Phone or Wireless PDA

Can’t be without your email when you’re on the road? Here are some options for getting email and other data on a wireless PDA or Smart Phone.

One of the slickest solutions is available to you if your company uses Microsoft Exchange 2003. There is a built in service called OMA which stands for Outlook Mobile Access. The user of the phone simply needs to go to your website and add ‘/oma’ to the end of the main URL, log in, and then can see their in-box, saved messages, contacts, calendar, and tasks. The output is designed to fit on the small display of a handheld device. This solution works very well.

Many of the devices on the market come with an email client program built in. If you have your email server set up to act as an IMAP4 server then you can obtain mail in this manner.

Often times wireless vendors have software that you can load on your desktop or on the email server. If loaded on your desktop then it redirects the data it finds in your local Outlook to its own server and then your phone can obtain it from there. This approach requires that you leave your desktop pc turned on and Outlook open.

If the wireless vendor provides an email server connector program then the mail can be pushed out at the server level. Typically this approach is more expensive and you need to have about 10 users to make it cost-effective. Some solutions are implemented behind the firewall with an encrypted connection to the wireless network. Others have a pull feature where the vendor obtains the needed data from the outside.

One other solution is from GoodLink. This approach is similar to the desktop approach above except you maintain your own server in house rather than using the wireless vendor’s system.