Is your PC smart enough for your phone?
We all want to be able to take our office with us as we move around. Sending and receiving emails and accessing office information on the go is becoming increasingly important to our clients so in this article we talk you through the ins and outs of the two hot contenders on the smart phone market, the BlackBerry and the iPhone.
How can you snyc up a BlackBerry to your email and computer data?
On a standard setup you can use a BlackBerry to send and receive email automatically from any email account, wherever you are. Unfortunately, unless you have specific software, you will only be able to sync with your Outlook calendar and contacts when you physically connect the BlackBerry to your PC - in other words when you get back to the office.
To update your appointments or contacts when you're out of the office you need BlackBerry Enterprise Server software installed on your server. This costs upwards of £1,800 and may need you to completely upgrade your server hardware, so only very large organisations would find it affordable.
What about iPhones?
Once the preserve of trendsetters, the launch of iPhone 4 means that older versions of the phones have become much more affordable and the iPhone is becoming increasingly common amongst our business and not for profit clients. According to the ads iPhones can sync your email, contracts and calendars, but in practise this is only true if your system is running Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.
As Andy Fairhall, SCIP’s IT Support Manager points out, the problems with using an iPhone arise when you try and link with older systems:
"Exchange 2007 is the most up-to-date option, and is the software we usually recommend when we install servers for our clients. This is very affordable through the charity software scheme CTX, but many of our clients are stil using one its predecessors called Small Business Server 2003.
"This has always been a low cost option and so has always been popular with not for profit clients. Although it's no longer available it is still perfectly useful and does what is needed. Unfortunately it cannot offer a reliable connection to an iPhone and getting it to collect email and synchronise properly is so hit or miss that it becomes unusable.
Upgrading Small Business Server 2003 to be compatible with an iPhone can be a costly business. Even organisations eligible for the CTX charity software scheme [see www.ctx.org.uk] may well have to upgrade their hardware and pay someone to handle the whole upgrade process. In one case we saw recently the costs would be have been upwards of £1,000, just to be able to connect two iPhones."
So both iPhones and Blackberrys will work with most systems to a limited degree, but if you're thinking about getting one for your organisations then it's worth checking what your current system will support before taking the plunge.
If you are about to buy a smart phone, make sure your computer is smart enough. Give SCIP a call on 01273 234049 and we’ll make sure that your operating system is compatible.
