expraxis

10 fewer things to hate about the iPhone

stephen — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:07:00 GMT

Last autumn I wrote a pair articles on 10 things that I loved, and hated, about the iPhone.

Nine months on I have had enough experience of using the iPhone in different settings to qualify as an "expert" user. I even have contact now with a handful of iPhone developers and may be getting involved in an iPhone startup company. One of the biggest steps forward, however, happened last weekend when O2 sent me the link to the iPhone 3.0 update and I installed it.

My top hate (and that of most users) has been the lack of cut and paste, followed by a number of smaller "gotchas" on version 2.0 like the absence of MMS and the inability to forward any kind of text message. I was confused by the inability to edit messages in landscape mode. As a longstanding and expert Microsoft Exchange user, I also deplored the loss of Exchange database richness on calendar and contact items and the absence of any task management.

Well, the bad news is that iPhone still doesn't have a task manager. You also still cannot add a Category to a Contact entry, and Contacts still has a "bug" in that contacts entered on the iPhone do not show up correctly in Exchange clients like Outlook, because the iPhone doesn't populate the "Full Name" field automatically (Prefix First Middle Last Suffix).

But that's it!

iPhone now has cut and paste! Whoopee!! It's still feels a little "odd" and strangely clunky to have the white on black rectangular menu bar hover over your document and I think there may be some improvements to be made in subsequent releases, but at least it's there and you can use it (I just published an article on my blog that's been locked on my iBlogger application for 5 months because I lost sync with my blog application and couldn't recover the article). Word and span selection isn't fantastic as the eyeglass interferes with your view of the document, but with practise it does the job.

SMS messages can now be forwarded, you can add a subject field if you want and you can attach image files (your network provider permitting). I'm not an avid SMS user but the forwarding facility has been sorely missed even for an occasional user such as myself.

I like the ability to edit Exchange field like Location on Calendar entries and reminders/alerts can be manipulated more finely than before. Best of all, you can now add meeting participants and send invitations! The iPhone is now a great Calendar client.

Overall stability is reasonable, although I have noticed that the device seems to emit warning sounds twice from time to time and seem to have more Bluetooth lock ups in the car, but that could be as much the vehicle's Bluetooth problem as the iPhone. Version 3.0 seems more responsive than 2.0 with less delay switching applications after a couple of days usage.

As an iPhone 2.0 hardware user, I still don't have video and I am lumbered with the puny battery life that this hardware release offers. Mind you my £40 MiLi backpack serves me well and any "road warrior" iPhone user needs to add this to their kit list.

This release of the iPhone software is very reassuring. Not just because it addresses a number of significant problems and issues that many users have pointed out, but also because it provides evidence that Apple is listening to its users. The Exchange developments underline Apple's commitment to delivering Enterprise capability and demonstrates that "professional" users are being taken as seriously as the broader consumer market base.

Apple - thank you!

When David turns Goliath

stephen — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:58:14 GMT

It isn't the part of my career that I'm most proud of and I can remember it all too clearly.

It was the summer of 1996. I was working for Microsoft in Paris in the newly-created Internet Customer Unit. Microsoft (not for the first time) was caught on it's back foot by an upstart new company called Netscape.

The World-Wide Web was all the rage and everyone wanted to stake their claim on the new market. Microsoft had a rudimentary browser product called Internet Explorer (2.0), but the market's imagination had been captured by Netscape's Navigator.

Why? Because for the first time in years, a company that wasn't Microsoft was producing a ubiquitous and truly vendor-agnostic platform for application development. By providing a simple, accessible and extensible environment in which developers could engineer a consistent user experience regardless of the machine on which the browser was running, the operating system effectively became irrelevant.

The significance of this was not lost on Netscape; in fact they "got it" before Microsoft. In their own words, Netscape "would reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers". An aspirational statement, certainly, but it also amounted to throwing down the gauntlet. And as a young, under-capitalised, one-product company standing up to the biggest software company in the world, slightly rash.

To understand how it felt from where we were, you have to appreciate that Microsoft itself was only 15 years old at that time and most of the "movers and shakers" in the company had joined at a time that computers and business machines were made by IBM or NCR and software wasn't a separate business. Microsoft had always been the upstart outsider and still had the start-up company's "street fighting" mentality. Although Netscape never had the resources to mount a realistic challenge, Microsoft wasn't going to sit back and ignore a direct challenge.

So we took them on. No dirty tricks, mind you, nothing illegal: We focussed on our strengths and enhanced the IE platform to create a more compelling development environment that reasserted the importance of the operating system. All well and good. But we also used our market strength in a way that we knew Netscape couldn't find an answer to.

As my boss said at the time, we "cut off their oxygen supply", which broadly translated into outspending them. If they spent $1 million, we'd spend $5 million. It was easy; we had the money, we knew they didn't. What they spent on marketing, they couldn't spend on product development or developer relations. We raised the stakes to the point that they just couldn't compete. And of course we won. In a year we grew from around 5% market share to around 75%. It was over as soon as it had started.

But was that right? Should we have competed in that way?

I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable at the time, but never to the point that I had the courage to call the tactics into question. I was too caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment to listen to my conscience and ask if we had the right to behave in that way.

I forgot that we were no longer the David of the industry, taking on the industrial establishment: We had become the establishment; we were the Goliath. We should have realised that the rules had changed and we should have moderated out behaviour. And I should have said so.

Of course we weren't the first to find ourselves in that position and I'm sure we won't be the last. Concentration of economic power can even be a force for good: Matching Reagan's "Star Wars" strategy (albeit a bluff) was one investment too far for the Soviet Union and precipitated the domino collapse that ultimately liberated East Germany and the Warsaw Pact states.

But it still requires conscience and the maturity to acknowledge that sometimes the rules change to the point that you have to keep your own behaviour in check.

This was brought home to me with stark clarity as I watched the shocking images of the devastation in Gaza recently. Listening to the arguments of politicians and ordinary people in Israel, it is clear that they haven't yet moved on from the Sabra mentality of independence, when they were the refugees, the forgotten ones that were desperately fighting for their existence using begged and borrowed materiel.

The pendulum has now swung the other way, giving Israel scope to work in a different way. Just because you can crush your opponents doesn't mean that you have to do it, no matter how convinced you are of the justice of your own cause: 150 dead Palestinian civilians (to use Israeli numbers) is a huge price to extract for 3 dead Israeli citizens.

Hamas in Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon don't only fight with rockets, even if they undeniably do resort to violence from time to time. They also build the schools and hospitals and provide the social infrastructure that nobody else does. I sometimes reflect on the comparative cost of a school in Gaza and the fuel and munitions for one F16 sortie, and wonder whether there is any hope that Israel will one day seek to exert influence in that way. It wouldn't be easy, but it may be worth finding out one day.

My life is thankfully much more mundane. Usually I am dealing with partners or customers where relative strengths are comparable. What I have learnt, however, is that the way that I interact with other people isn't simply predicated by my needs and wants: I have to consider who it is that I am working with and how they can interact with me.

I like to think that, if I was thrown back into Microsoft in 1996, I would have behaved in a different way. Maybe there was common ground somewhere that we could have sought. Maybe if we had competed with Netscape in a different way, accepting their successes, then new opportunities would have appeared for us that we never even considered.

Or maybe we could have just remembered, for a moment, what it was like to be the underdog, and asked ourselves what we would have thought of our own actions in their shoes.

Tags: Microsoft, Israel, Netscape, Gaza

Dear Microsoft …

stephen — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:45:00 GMT

I now have a working installation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0! Yes, I do! Really!

I had one before, actually, but then I decided last week that running a 64-bit application on a 64-bit server against a 32-bit database was just so passé. Not the done thing. So I thought I’d change.

So I installed SQL Server 2008. It was great. Everything went really well in fact, bar one error on my part when I tried to upgrade over the existing installation rather than removing all the 32-bit stuff fist. About 10 hours work and I had it installed and 3 of the applications that depended on SQL completely migrated. Not bad!

Then I tried to migrate the CRM. Oh dear! What a mess.

I tried just to migrate the databases and after a bit of forcing I was able to get a working deployment, but with no offline client access – the SQL 2005 Express client engine was having nothing of this “new” data. So I removed everything from the client, installed SQL 2008 Express on the client, tried again, but no joy.

In the meantime the server started to play up, big time. It started with Reports not working, then all sorts of other errors crept in. At this point I decided to reinstall SQL 2008 and CRM 4.0 again from scratch. And I got there! It only took 3 days of almost solid work, at least 3 bare SQL installs, a manual uninstall of CRM 4.0 (because of registry and patch corruption), a full reinstall of CRM 4.0, 3 concurrent threads running on Microsoft support, several organisation redeployments, a lot of manual AD fettling to remove redundant accounts and set installer account permissions, much bitching and snapping, and goodness knows how much changing of service accounts and reboots.

Then, all of a sudden, this morning everything stopped! Lots of ASP.NET errors and server application errors reported through browsers. I restored the databases to a restore point about 12 hours previously. I rebooted. I changed a few service accounts. I rebooted again. And everything started again!!

Yes, really, it works!! Even Reports! And a fresh install of the CRM client for Outlook with SQL 2005 Express works a treat.

What confuses me is why, in 2009, a server product like CRM 4.0 (bits released in 2007) and a server like SQL 2008 don’t just work together. Why should I need to manually add the installer account with special privileges in AD so that the CRM installer will propagate the appropriate security group settings to the SQL Reporting Service? Why should I need to EXPERIMENT to find a combination of domain and system account settings for 4 different services and one IIS application pool (that’s a lot of combinations) that will work on my machine without throwing errors? Above all, why should the system run one day, stop the next, then all of a sudden work again the next? This isn’t software, it’s black magic!!

Oh well, I’m through that barrier now and the system does, at least, do everything it should. It’s even better for having upgraded the database engine – subjectively I would say it’s 30%-50% faster recovering account and contact records. And Reports work really well. But I feel I have aged more than the 6 days since I started this particular exercise. My downtime alone would have paid about 4 years subscription to Salesforce.com.

Now there’s a thought …

Expraxis Technology

stephen — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:21:00 GMT

For those who are interested I thought I'd just briefly described the technology infrastructure that I use here at Expraxis to support my business operations and this Blog.

I work remotely for 90% of my time. My key considerations when designing my system were therefore:

Ability to send and receive email 24/7 using PCs, mobile devices and the web
Ability to access and archive files remotely, with no manual intervention
High availability and security

I have used Microsoft Exchange since 2000 (in fact since 1993 when I worked at Microsoft) and find that it offers me all that I need for remote working and collaboration. I have grown through 2000, 2003 and now use 2007. I use Windows Mobile devices for on-the-road communications and Outlook Anywhere on PCs to access email, address book, calendar and task lists. Exchange 2003 and 2007 offer pretty good spam and virus protection, but I have been an avid user of Red Earth Software's Policy Patrol products for spam, anti-virus, message archiving and routing since 2005.

I am now starting to use Microsoft CRM 4.0 quite extensively and will be rolling this out with a client soon - I particularly like the ability to work in both online and offline roles, although an effective Mac and iPhone client would be very useful.

All my notebooks and desktops are Windows XP or Vista (with one Macbook) which means I can use folder redirection and offline folders. This means that you work on a cached copy of server data, even when you are not connected to the server, and PCs synchronise automatically with servers whenever they are in contact. Because of the offline folders feature, I don't need to connect directly to servers when I work offsite, however I do have an L2TP VPN with IPSEC set up so I can retrieve data or perform a remote synchronisation securely when I need to.

All data folders on the server have shadow copy enabled so I can retrieve historic versions of files in case of mishap and all folders are backed up automatically (to a dedicated backup machine rather than offsite, though this is an option).

The Macbook does not offer offline folders out of the box and is the one reason I won't use a Mac for mission critical applications yet - I could do some scripting or use a thid party product to achieve the same thing as offline folders but don't see why I should!

I do my own web hosting as it means I can implement database-driven web apps and use Sharepoint integrated into my own Active Directory for project support. I use IIS 6.0 (part of Windows Server 2003) with SQL Server 2008 for database support. My primary web presence (this web site) uses Graffiti CMS which is an ASP.NET application with web data stored on the SQL Server. This works fine for me given the moderate data volumes concerned, but I may turn to remote hosting should volumes start to be a concern.

The physical infrastructure uses 3 rackmount servers. I used to use a single server, the Powerdge 2850 with its two dual-core processors and RAID arrays and dual redundant power supplies (one on a UPS) running Small Business Server 2003. However I found that Active Directory authentication was starting to become a pinch point, so I recently took the decision to add two Poweredge 1850s (1U versions of the 2850 with only 2 disks), one of which runs as a dedicated authentication server doing only Active Directory, DNS/WINS and RADIUS, the other of which is running ISA 2006 and serves as a caching firewall and proxy. This configuration has dramatically improved throughput and also adds an additional layer of Internet security. All 3 servers run on a dedicated Gigabit network segment via dual redundant NICs.

With RAID 5 for data and RAID 1 for all system disks, dual power supplies on UPS, dual NICs and even backup memory channels in the processors, I have suffered no server data loss for over 3 years. The caching features of Outloook 2003/7 similarly ensure that I maintain a secure copy of all emails on the server even if a PC or mobile device breaks or is lost, and I can remotely wipe mobile devices in the event of a device being stolen. All data files on notebooks are duplicates of data on the network and can be encrypted, ensuring that I have total data resilience on PCs as well.

Overall I have to say that the combination of Dell server hardware and Microsoft server software is absolutely bulletproof, and I cannot say that I have any problems installing or maintaining the infrastructure. As a Microsoft partner my software costs are very low, of course, however the installation I am using would not cost more than $3,000 to license fully as a consumer - in other words less than 30% of the cost of the hardware deployed. As nearly all of the software is deployed "out of the box", service support costs are trivial.

I will shortly embark on a programme of upgrades, taking the servers up to Windows Server 2008, adding Office Communications Server and voice messaging through Exchange 2007.

If you would like any advice on how to set up your own office infrastructure using Microsoft technology just drop me a line.

Dear Apple ...

stephen — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:39:51 GMT

Dear Apple,

I have been using my iPhone for about 6 months now. I am starting to like it quite a lot. It looks good, the iPod bit is terrific and it packs a lot of kudos into a small package. I like the way I can read attachments inside emails, even though they were written using applications developed by Microsoft. I love browsing through long lists by flicking and pointing. I don't really use the GPS that much but I love Google Maps on the iPhone and the way location sesitive applications like MyRail Lite and Tweetie integrate and use location sensibly. Really good!

But please can I have a few use USEFUL things as well? Being sure that I can receive telephone calls would be nice, rather than just getting voicemail notifications to say that someone has been trying to ring me and the iPhone was unable to pick it up. Being able to forward text messages would be good too - if you have kids and get long messages you need to forward to the other parent, you'll know what a boon that would be.

Oh, and being able to edit messages would be fantastic, too - you know, when you want to copy a bit of a message and use it somewhere else, or recover a blog post from a blogging tool that refuses to publish the article so you don't have to type it all again. I know I'm not the only person to want these things.

I see you've just released the third update since I got the phone and was really, really hoping you'd give these things to us. Maybe in the next update? Sometime soon, please!

Thank you!

Tags: iPhone

On the importance of being accurate

stephen — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:47:00 GMT

The headline reads "Japan stocks fall on dire Microsoft, Sony results", reporting on a 3.8% slide in the Nikkei 225. The mood has been cast. "It's definitely a shock for investors to see such massive losses at companies like Microsoft and Intel Corp.," said Tsuyoshi Segawa, an equity strategist at Shinko Securities in Tokyo.

Hang on there! Let's just wind back that remark!

"It's definitely a shock for investors to see such massive losses at companies like Microsoft." Massive losses? Funny that - it's not the way I read the results.

The interim results announced by Microsoft yesterday were certainly sobering for anyone with background knowledge of the industry in general and of Microsoft in particular. Slow to react to major market trends for years, Microsoft has become particularly bloated over the last few years. Many feel it has overcommitted in areas like online and personal entertainment, and allowed itself the luxury of complacency in terms of hiring and employee rewards in businesses that were speculative at the best of time. So the reaction of the company in terms of cost cutting and a commitment to reduce headcount by up to 5,000 over the next 18 months is no more than anyone would have expected in the light of a tailoff in results and as an investor is most welcome.

But let's just be clear about those results, shall we?

Microsoft has sales last quarter of $16.63 billion. That's about $330 million MORE than its sales in the same period in 2007. Microsoft's pretax profits were down 8% but were still $5.94 billion. Microsoft still has free cash of the order of $20 billion. In the midst of these less than stellar results, the server and tools division were up a massive 15% year over year to $3.74 billion. And even in the blighted consumer area, XBox 360 sales were particularly buoyant, lifting the entertainment and devices division's revenue by 3% to $3.18 billion

So "massive losses" is by no means acccurate and is no more than general media-pumped froth and hysteria. Yes, it reflects the sentiment in the market that lead to the 11% stock price fall yesterday, and Ballmer's announcements yesterday show that the giant of Redmond is taking the downturn seriously, but let's maintain some sense of perspective here.

And let's keep the reporting accurate.

The pitfalls of iPhone and Exchange

stephen — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:06:00 GMT

What an interesting week that was!

After publishing my article on iPhone connectivity to Exchange and experimented, I deleted the Exchange profile on the iPhone and tried to rebuild it. Not to be recommended. 2 days later, having completely wiped and rebuilt the iPhone 3 times, exported and rebuilt my Exchange mailbox once, deleted and completely rebuilt my Active Directory identity once, deleted and rebuilt my Outlook offline folders twice and having rummaged deeper into the depths of Exchange 2007's Management Console than I ever care to do again .... it all works. Apart from the occasional EXCDO Event 8206 and 8207 errors on Exchange.

I'm not pointing fingers here. I have probably read over 50 threads on the topic this week, mostly written by Microsoft MSCPs but some written from the Apple camp, and I think the blame has to be shared equally.

Apple don't seem to have implemented the ActiveSync protocol completely correctly, that's for sure. I don't just mean the absence of any Task/To Do functionality and the loss of item richness in Mail and Calendar. Its error handling is poor and it seems to time out far too rapidly. It loses email account settings too - in fact the concensus in the Apple camp seems to be if you are going to use Exchange, you had better Jailbreak the iPhone or just hope you don't need to do any debugging at all.

Also DON'T GET ME STARTED on iPhone security (root and identity certificate key chains) - if you load certificates manually, you seem to have less than an even chance of the iPhone recognising the keychain, and unless you Jailbreak you have NO means of managing certificates on the device. In the end I went back to using Apple's iPhone Configuration Utility just to install the certificate chains, because that way you can force things on the PC. (The problem with this tool is that the profile on the iPhone cannot be edited by users, so any configuration change has to be made on a PC/Mac and then redistributed to the iPhone, which risks losing data on the iPhone).

The Microsoft engineers are split 50-50 on the iPhone. Most dislike it or prefer Blackberry or WM6 devices, particularly when it comes to bulk deployment, the rest accept that the iPhone is very compelling. All regard iPhone 2.0 as pretty much as Alpha product when it comes to mission critical business deployment: It can be made to work, but at a cost in terms of lost time and hand wringing that is hard to justify.

In reality, as someone who really values Microsoft server platforms but is dubious about recent desktop OSs from Redmond, I have to admit that the problem with the iPhone is that it is a magnifying glass for any lurking inconsistencies in your Exchange data that have been there all along, but that Microsoft apps seems to be able to cope with. The EXCDO errors are a case in point - it's actually just dirty recurring appointment data. If your data is bad, it's bad. Most of the time Exchange can cope with it - it simply goes out of focus and will eventually be deleted. Unfortunately turning the focus back by doing something like rebuilding an OST file or Archiving an OST file then starts generating database errors on Exchange that slow the system sufficiently for the iPhone to start having serious problems handshaking with ActiveSync.

The biggest problem apart from dirty appointment data has been getting at device partnership data inside the Exchange Mailbox. It's there, but the UI is arcane to the point of absurdity and still has undocumented features.

For example, if you manually set Mobile Device policy to a value, Exchange considers that to be a non-default policy and the policy may block some aspects of new device pairing (for example blocking non-provisionable devices). This status is recorded in a parameter ActiveSyncMailboxPolicyIsDefaulted with the value "False". If you wish to revert to the default policy, you cannot do it by reapply the default policy. The ActiveSyncMailboxPolicyIsDefaulted parameter needs to be set to "True, but of course there is no explicit command for setting this value. The command is:

Set-CASMailbox -identity [user] -ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy $nul

at which point the ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy parameter will say "Default", but in fact only because it's nul and the default policy is called "Default", however the ActiveSyncMailboxPolicyIsDefaulted parameter becomes "True" which is the state you want. Still with me? Well, don't worry, at least you have had a glimpse into the dark art of Exchange 2007 system maintenance :-).

Anyway, it's now all back up and working fairly smoothly. Lesson learnt: once it works, leave well alone. Oh, and don't forget to archive your Outlook Calendar data regularly to get rid of those old recurring reminders that seem to be at the root of the EXCDO error and poor Exchange 2007 database performance.

Tags: iPhone, Exchange 2007

Configuring iPhone to work with Microsoft Exchange

stephen — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:45:00 GMT

Most large corporate deployments will rely on Apple's iPhone Configuration Utility (available from http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/enterprise/). This tool, available in versions for both OS/X and Windows, allows IT departments to set up template deployments with pre-defined settings and also to distribute certificates to iPhone users via iTunes.

For most small businesses or standalone users, however, this is not an appropriate way to go and it is easier simply to set up the device by hand. This is quite straightforward for non-SSL accounts and relatively straightforward if you use SSL connections to Exchange (optional with Exchange 2003, "mandatory" or at least hard to work around in Exchange 2007). Let's take the easy case first, configuring without SSL.

First of all you need to create an email account on the iPhone:

On the iPhone, choose "Settings", and then choose "Mail, Contacts, and Calendars".
Choose "Add Account".
Choose type "Microsoft Exchange".
Enter your Email address
Enter your Exchange Login ID (Domain, Username and Password - the Domain is the part of your login that appears before the backslash "\"). This is the same ID that you would use to log into Outlook or Outlook Web Access.
Enter a Description (option). The field will probably be populated automatically with your Email address but it can also be left blank.Tap "Next" to start the configuration process.
A new field for "Server" will pop up. In theory, if you Exchange server is correctly configured it should detect most of your settings automatically using the Autodiscover feature, but I have generally had to step in at this point and manuually enter the name of my Server. This is usually the same server name you would use to access Outlook Web Access.
The iPhone will verify your account information and if everything has been set up correctly you will see a screen offering to set up Exchange for "Mail"; "Contacts"; and "Calendars". All switches should be in the ON position. Hit "Save".

To tweak different features, go back to "Settings" and "Mail, Contacts, Calendar.". Features that you can adjust are:

Generally, how many emails are shown in each folder,
Within "Accounts", how many "Mail days to sync" (how long emails are kept on the iPhone). The default is only 3 days so you may want to increase this to 1 month.
Within "Accounts" and "Account info" whether SSL is turned on or not.

If your Exchange server requires SSL connections, there is an additional step to take to install the appropriate certificates on your iPhone in your "Profile". This can be slightly more complicated and is covered in a separate article. Once installed the certificates they are visible on your iPhone in "Settings", "General" and "Profile".

Tags: iPhone, Exchange 2007

Free iPhone Ringtones!

stephen — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:42:00 GMT

Yes, it is possible! And it involves virtually no work.

Basically take any .mp4 sound file (iTunes stores music as .mp4, for example when ripping CDs or importing .wma files) then rename the file with the extension .mpr ("r" for "ringtone").

That's it! Once renamed, clicking on the file will open iTunes and store the file in the library as a ringtone. From there you can select the ringtone in you iPhone profile to be synced with the phone itself.

Of course if you want to make the ringtone more usable you may need to edit it. For example an ideal ringtone length is about 6-10 seconds followed by a second or so if silence - the ring tone repeat itself automatically.

I don't have an .mp4 editor but I can edit .wma files and .mp3 files. I then import and convert the edited sound file to .mp4 format in iTunes before changing the name.

Have fun!

Tags: iPhone, Ringtones

Synching Outlook/Exchange Tasks on the iPhone

stephen — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:57:00 GMT

Yes, it can be done.

I have tried two solutions tonight with some success.

MyChapura KeyTasks is a great solution for the office-based user with a fixed desktop that is happy to synchronize via a static Outlook client. It works by installing an application on your desktop PC that polls the client image of the task list and sends this data to an online account at Chapura. From there you can pull the data down manually to your iPhone.

As a plus this is a pragmatic solution that works immediately. It is also a rich iPhone client with category filtering and sorting. It looks great! The downsides of course are that this is client-side solution where you need to have Outlook running on a client to perform a full sync, so it isn't as suited to the road warrior, and this isn't "push" technology. Cost is £5.99 on AppStore.

TaskData is a true server-side solution that installs onto the iPhone and turns it into an OWA client, pulling task data from the server. SSL is supported. This is a better approach but is slightly harder to set up and will generally mean you have to install certificates onto the iPhone if you use SSL on Exchange (which you should).

Unfortunately I haven't been able to test as the current version only supports Exchange 2003 and I use 2007, so I cannot say if this is a true Push client. The 2007 version should be available later this week, however. Because I haven't tested it I don't know yet whether Category sorting and filtering is supported. Coat is £7.95 from AppStore.

Alternatives that I haven't investigated are server-based subscription services from iPXSync and Visto, both of which are currently in Beta and both of which are monthly/term subscriptions rather than software purchases. I have also seen some discussion about using Plaxo as a server bridge for task synchronization but I don't feel that this is the best way forward.

I will update this article as and when the new TaskData version becomes available. If anyone has additional experience please leave me a comment.

Tags: iPhone, Exchange 2007