The Sikh Geek

 I don’t really need it but let’s face it when do we ever get another gadget when we need it! I have a SPV C600 with Windows Mobile 5.0 which works okay. There are a few things which are a bit dodgy such as the Radio Circuity has a tendency to lose network connection in low signal levels and slow to reacquire it. The device does occaisionally fail to switch-off unless you hold the standby-power key for a prolonged period. It is however an essential business tool. The SPV E650 is available for free and has Windows Mobile 6.0 but you’ll have to sign-up for another 12 month contract period but is no great problem.

Richard’s got an excellent post on setting up third party SSL certificates for SBS 2003, very detailed with screenshots and great explanations. Richard is right to highlight the ridiculously cheap (but effective) GoDaddy Certs that I use for my server. Why people insist on trying to install the self-signed certs, I really cannot understand, with having to load the cert up on each mobile device you want to activesync with your server.

I admire people who right such detailed posts. I always think I will do one but I really haven’t the patience!

You’ve probably seen all the postings regarding the release of Windows Mobile 6.0 but this has made me sad because I want to know whether I’ll be able to upgrade my Orange SPV C600 to it and how soon? These vendors, they tease you and make you want it and then you can’t get your hands on one of them! My Smartphone with Mobile 5.0 and direct push email is an amazing business tool. Although saying that many users see a downside to mobile devices accessing email which is highlighted by this article at ComputerWeekly. The question asked by the article is that do these devices liberate or chain you to your work? The fact that I’m writing this at 00.21 answers the question!

One of the questions at Dave Overton’s sessions at the SBSC Symposium the other day was about Windows Mobile Center in Vista and lo and behold it’s RTM’ed.

I’ve just enabled Microsoft Direct Push on my Orange SPV C600 and it’s just way cool! Blackberry, hah take that!

I’ve been waiting to sort out handling of Spam which I’ve done using IMF v2 (Intelligent Message Filter) and it’s performing a great job. It’s about 99.99% effective and has correctly classified all Spam with only a few valid emails being classified as Junk. I didn’t want Spam being pushed to my mobile and this has done the trick - bandwidth is precious!

I’ve set IMF to put Spam into the user’s mailbox Junk folder rather than keep it on the server, because on the server it would be saved as an .eml file and you’d need a method of reviewing these emails which isn’t provided out of the box. It’s easier just to have a quick review of the Junk folder on the client side.

I’m loving the Microsoft technology at the moment!

I’ve been lent one of these by my brother-in-law and of course the driver isn’t going to install on Vista (yes, I did try it!), so it’s on the XP laptop. Installation is fairly straightforward and the datacard tries to pick up any 3G coverage as default but defaults to GPRS if it can’t. The SBS Diva has been posting about her experiences of 3G data access over in the US and it sounds like the situation is pretty similar here as well. You’ll only get solid 3G around major urban areas otherwise it’s GPRS or Edge depending on what network you’re with (I’m not sure who’s supporting Edge in the UK?). GPRS is just GSM with some clever use of the empty timeslots in the GSM channels for carrying data and Edge is an enhanced modulation scheme of GSM essentially increasing the amount of symbols that can be packed into the same frequency bandwidth.

On another side note 3G in the UK/Europe/Rest of World (excluding China) and the US are not the same! Yes, those Ameicans have once again decided on a different standard called CDMA2000 whereas everyone else is using UMTS/WCDMA. These standards are overseen by a single body called 3GPP. America has had a CDMA (US company Qualcomm holds patents in CDMA) based network for a long time and there has been a battle between the two, so its interesting that Susan mentions GSM/Edge. CDMA stands for Code Division Multiple Access and sends data as a pseudo-random sequence and when that PRSN is correlated over itself, there is a very sharp peak. You can recover this signal even if it’s buried deep within noise. Traditional American systems are based on a system called narrowband CDMA whereas 3G is based on wideband CDMA and accounts for the increased datarates achieveable with 3G. Ahh, the long lost days of adaptive signal processing techniques!

Anyway data access using 3G is quite affordable and when you do get 3G coverage you’ll be able to get some decent datarates. Theoretical rates are upto 384kps but as always you’re not going to get the maximum.

I finally got a Orange SPV C600 device after having initially considered the SPV M5000. The C600 is a Windows Mobile 5.0 which has a standard phone keypad, so it’s basically more phone like rather than PDA like. It doesn’t feature 3G or EDGE (which is an enhanced version of GSM) or WiFi but is a GSM/GPRS device, so it’s not going to have the fastest datarates in the world. Seeing as I already had a Dell Axim x50v PDA (upgraded to Windows Mobile 5.0), then I thought I would go for the C600 for it’s more phone like portability. I think I made a wise choice as apparently the battery life on the M5000 is quite poor. Also, I can use the C600 as a GPRS modem for my PDA/Laptop using the bluetooth connection. The Business 120 plan, to which I subscribed, gives me 120 minutes and 4 MB of data per month for a monthly fee of £30 (inc vat) and you get the phone free!

Setting this up for syncing with my SBS 2003 server was really quite easy. You need a SSL certificate from a trusted third party and I used GoDaddy. The Turbo SSL Certicate is $19.99 per year. I set up a subdomain of iqubed.biz which I pointed to the static IP address of my SBS 2003 server. I followed the Microsoft Technet guide to deploying Windows Mobile 5.0 on SBS 2003. The SSL certificate is requested and processed entirely online and an authentication email is sent to the registered owner of the domain. You simply click on the authentication link on the email received (assuming you are the owner of the domain). The certificate is emailed to you and is installed on the SBS server and then you configure the “server source” on Activesync on the Mobile Device and that’s it. It worked first time and now I have mobile access to email, contacts and calendar. The whole process took about an hour to do.

I’ve found that you can’t use the self signed certificate because Windows Mobile 5.0 is stricter security wise and doesn’t import the client side certificate (maybe there is a way around this?). With a trusted third party certificate you don’t import anything on the client side.

The C600 has Microsoft Direct Push Technology and with Exchange SP2 installed on SBS 2003, email can be automatically synced to the mobile device. This basically gives you the same functionality as a Blackberry.

I also set this up today for a client who had an Orange SPV M3100. I had implemented 1and1’s Hosted Exchange Service for them and again it was really easy to set up and worked straight away and it also supports the direct push technology.

Access to your information anytime and anywhere really is a reality with SBS 2003. One of the reasons for doing this is so that I can show potential/existing clients the mobility features of SBS 2003.

I visited the B2B Midlands Business Expo in Coventry yesterday and was interested to see Blackberry was being pushed quite heavily with presentations from O2 (which were very poorly attended). However, I got talking to a distributor of Blackberry based in Leicester (which is handy) and the new Blackberry Pearl device looks quite good! Also, by signing up as a reseller I could get the Blackberry Enterprise Server software (normally costing £999) for free and integrate that with my SBS Exchange Server. I have to say that my Dell Axim x50v PDA, which I upgraded to Windows Mobile 5.0 has to be soft and hard reset quite often!!

I’m on a bit of a mobility role at the moment. Now that I’ve got my Dell PDA to synchronise with SBS 2003, this is no longer good enough and I need the phone capability as well. I started looking at the Orange SPV 3100 Smartphone, which looks good and has a slide out keyboard which I like.

You can get it for £42.54 if you sign up for a 12 month £22 per month contract (inclusive of 120 minutes)! Not bad really! The reviews of it seem quite positive and access to things like email when out of the office are essential now. Also, it’ll be a great demo of mobility with SBS 2003 to potential customers.

Since I realised that Windows Mobile 5.0 won’t allow self signed certificates, I’ve been wondering what’s the best way around this. There are a number of online places where you can get a SSL certificate for about $99 which should work fine. However, in order to synchronise my Dell PDA with SBS 2003 I turned off the SSL Encryption as this was just over my local wireless network (which is encrypted anyway). This worked fine and all felt good. Then I thought, well if you can establish a VPN link back to SBS 2003 (which is fairly straightforward with SBS 2003) then you can synchronise that way without a certificate!