Tech at Play

If you’re pardon the title, but I figured that “RFID technology at play” just sounds weird here — never mind that I named the site Tech at Play in the first place. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I went over to the resort island of Sentosa over the weekend.

The company running the resort island issued an entrance card that serves as an electronic tag for its automated gantries. The technology is obviously RFID, though the interesting thing here is that their RFID card is made from cardboard instead of plastic. To verify my theory, I successfully ripped the card into two-halves — at the end of the day of course.

Note the outline of the RFID antenna in the second photo. Apologies if you’re wondering about the view outside my window, which, since I live on the 24th level, is really nice.

My RFID reader is nicely mothballed into a nice storage box, so I didn’t feel inclined to rig it up this time. This is assuming compatible standards in the first place, which seems too much to ask for. Despite all the noise over RFID lately however, I very much doubt that any form of encryption or challenge-response mechanism is even used here.

Then again, it does not make much sense to forge a SG$3 (~US$2.20) ticket either, does it?

You might want to check out this presentation of push mail by Jason Langridge at an IT Forum in Barcelona in November 2006 on Microsoft’s own experiences in supporting a giant scale rollout consisting of over 40,000 internal users connecting via Windows Mobile to Exchange 2003.

This session will give guidance on how to successfully implement such a rollout of mobile devices successfully.  It covers topics such as infrastructure requirements, scalability, deployment considerations, device provisioning and user training.  Essential for anyone looking to deploy mobile devices inside their organisation.

There are two ways of setting up Direct Push. You can either configure it directly from your mobile handheld Pocket PC wirelessly, or when tethered to your desktop PC.  The following walk-through describes setting up Direct Push via the desktop option where no prior pairing has been done.

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Which uses less traffic; the BlackBerry or a Pocket PC configured for push mail?  There was a time where the BlackBerry reigned supreme and no such questions were asked, ever.  However, with the slew of maturing push mail options on the market today, people are now asking.  Indeed, at the heart of more than a few forum discussions or flame-wars, and even reflected in many of the search queries that send visitors coming to Technology At Play daily – this is one of the perennial question we encounter whenever there is a comparison of push mail technologies.

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For those of your fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be running Direct Push off a company-policed Exchange server; there might be instances in which company policies (or just plain inflexible IT personnel) might select the "auto-lock" option and enforce it as a policy on your device.

Nothing wrong with that – except that the minimum password length has been set to 12 characters!  So you are now forced to re-enter your password EVERY time your pocket pc device switches itself off automatically.  So since the policy was really targeted at those careless blokes from Sales, you wonder if there is any way around this pain on your fingertips. And yes, there is!

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If you have read the first few articles of my Direct Push Guide, you would probably have noticed that Direct Push is very much tied into Microsoft Exchange.  In fact, Microsoft Exchange itself forms a critical part of the Direct Push architecture – from the earlier AUTD implementation as well as the current iteration available to a Windows Mobile 5.0 device with MSFP.

Thinking ahead, it becomes clear that we can extrapolate and work out most, if not all of the what Direct Push will evolve into or incorporate simply by taking a closer look into the features that can be found in upcoming or future versions of Microsoft Exchange.

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I first came across an article condemning Windows Mobile’s “Security Problems” in its push mail implementation only earlier today. Because I have been writing about Direct Push over the last 2 weeks, I was naturally intrigued. Now, whilst I do rather like the current Direct Push implementation, I am no fan-boy either. I like Direct Push simply based on my personal evaluation and requirements.

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I thought long and hard not about the contents of this article, but about the title. While sure to generate some controversy, this is what I believe to be the case. My personal opinion is that the current implementation of Direct Push overall is better than RIM’s BlackBerry device where it comes to push mail access on Microsoft Exchange.  In fact, I consider Direct Push to be superior to any of the other offerings on the market when it comes to using Exchange as a backend mail server.

As it is, the BlackBerry is still very much a de facto standard in the push mail market which it created practically single-handedly. Hence we have this little comparison with it, and the corresponding title – “ How is Microsoft’s Direct Push better than the BlackBerry?”

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From the earlier section “When nudge comes to shove: How push is Direct Push”, we talked about three methods of retrieving Email available to Windows Mobile 5.0 devices onwards – by polling, Direct Push, or manually. All three methods of retrieving your Email ride on top of your standard mobile technologies such as GPRS, EGPRS and 3G etcetera.

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It might not be immediately obvious to the beginner; but there are actually three primary ways for retrieving your Email on a Windows Mobile 5.0 MSFP device. Depending on your data plan, preference and requirements, this flexibility is actually pretty useful.

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The push mail that this guide focuses upon is implemented using a Windows Mobile 5.0 device with the Messaging and Security Feature Pack (MSFP) together with a Microsoft Exchange 2003 SP2 server. For additional information about whether you have the minimum requirements, please refer to the pre-requisite stated in the next section of this guide.

In this section however, we shall touch a little on Always-Up-To-Date (AUTD), which is the name of Microsoft’s earlier (and initial) attempt at rolling-out Push Mail. AUTD is the only option for Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows Mobile 2003 SE devices for Push Mail. AUTD is also the only Push Mail option on the server side for vanilla Exchange 2003. Exchange 2003 SP2 supports both AUTD and Direct Push.

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I think it would be fair to credit the popularization of the term ‘Push Mail’ to Research in Motion’s (RIM) ubiquitous BlackBerry device. For those living in a cave in Afghanistan for the last few years, push mail refers to the automatic receipt of Emails – implicitly assumed to be a handheld device, as soon as they arrive at the destination Email server. This is in contrast to the traditional way of receiving mails either via manually triggering it at the Email client or by performing an automated poll after every stipulated number of minutes.

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I am currently working on a comprehensive guide to Microsoft’s Direct Push Technology based on my own experiences (I wanted to say struggles, but if I said that you probably wouldn’t read it anymore would you?) getting Microsoft Exchange 2003 SP2 and my HP rw6818 to talk push mail. The topics and coverage are more or less finalized. In fact, I’ve listed them below.

Hopefully, it’ll be a help to folks tearing their hair out trying to get Microsoft’s push mail up and running with their Windows Mobile 5.0 devices. The goal is to create a readable guide that gives a sufficiently technical and broad coverage of Direct Push without boring you to tears. This placeholder page will not be changed – so feel free to link here directly and come back periodically as I finish up the other sections.

As it is a work in progress, if you spot any fractual mistakes or errors, do feel free to feedback to me by leaving your comments on this blog or by dropping me a mail directly at paulmah (at) gmail.com. Cheers!