Before I became a marketing wonk I was a knowledgeable technologist, which is probably why I've never once enjoyed any e-mail system that I have used or implemented. Over the last 15 years, I have tried pretty much everything, from Pine to Zimbra, to MS Exchange to Lotus Notes and several different IMAP and POP options. Every time it's the same thing--the system works within reason but is never great. And there is always something that bites you in the rear.
I first started outsourcing e-mail to managed providers in 2003 when I worked for a CEO who demanded MS Exchange and we only had Linux boxes. It was never great and it was too expensive to boot. But the offerings have gotten much better and at this point I can't see a small- or medium-sized business running its own mail server. It's just not necessary.
Here are my fundamental hopes for e-mail:
- Reliable delivery of mail (dare to dream)
- Reliable delivery of mail on mobile devices (Blackberry and iPhone)
- Shared calendaring with administrator abilities (i.e. admin access)
- Backup and recovery
- Reliable SPAM prevention
- Sync across multiple computers and devices
If you like Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client software but hate the expense of licensing and running Exchange Server, Cemaphore Systems has a proposition for you: a subscription service that effectively lets people dump Exchange in favor of Google's cloud-computing infrastructure.
The product, called Mailshadow for Google Apps, or MailShadow G, is being made available in a beta test version on Wednesday, according to the company. Cemaphore says the product ultimately will be licensed via a monthly subscription fee.
Cemaphore says the service "instantaneously synchronizes e-mail, calendars, and contacts between Outlook, Exchange, and Gmail." Translation: If you want to get rid of Exchange and run your e-mail back end on Google, this is the product for you.
Much has been made of Google's challenge to Microsoft's desktop application hegemony. One of the key reasons for Microsoft's dominance is e-mail and Exchange, its e-mail and communications server. Once installed in companies, Exchange and Outlook form the backbone of a vital application that's difficult to migrate away from or replace.
In many instances, companies must license, install, and maintain multiple copies of Exchange in order to keep their e-mail infrastructure working. For smaller companies, the overhead can be substantial.
A cost-efficient way to eliminate internal management of e-mail infrastructure in favor of a cloud-based service, linked to Google's popular Gmail service, will likely appeal to many companies, large and small. Microsoft has in recent years worked with outside providers to offer hosted versions of Exchange.
Cemaphore Systems, founded in 2002, specializes in e-mail backup and caching systems that link to Exchange. The company says MailShadow will eventually work with other online e-mail services.
Apple has finally granted the wish of business users who have craved the coolness of the iPhone but couldn't live without their push work e-mail.
News.com Poll
Until now, iPhone users who wanted to get e-mail on their iPhones had to jump through a series of technical hoops. And as a result, a lot of business users, who would have otherwise bought the iPhone right away, have stood on the sidelines with their BlackBerrys or Windows Mobile phones drooling at the iPhone.
But now these business users will be able to get their work e-mail on an iPhone just as easily as they can on a Windows mobile phone or a BlackBerry. On Thursday, Apple announced at an event at its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., that Apple has licensed the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol, which will make it much easier to do push e-mail and contacts with Exchange servers.
Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, demonstrated on stage how to activate and set up the Exchange function on an iPhone. The entire set up can be done over the air allowing e-mail, contacts, and calendar information to be automatically pushed to a device.
The iPhone opens up for business
The announcement is a huge deal for Apple, because it eliminates one of the barriers the company faced in addressing the business market. It also made the iPhone more appealing to a group known as prosumers, people who buy their own cell phones for personal use, but also access some business applications, such as corporate e-mail, on their phones.
Right now, Research in Motion dominates the business smartphone market with over two-thirds of its 12 million customers coming from businesses and government. Large businesses bought in early to RIM's push e-mail system, which requires large companies to have all their e-mail routed through RIM's own servers. For the most part, RIM's BlackBerry e-mail service has been a huge success. But there are signs that the company's dominance could be vulnerable. In the past six months RIM has experienced at least two major outages where e-mails were not forwarding to BlackBerry devices in a timely manner.
Blackberry's co-CEO Jim Balsillie said a day after the last outage that he wasn't too worried about the outage affecting its relationship with business customers. But as Apple makes it easier for corporate customers to get e-mail on the iPhone, he may reconsider.
Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:20 p.m. PST to add comments from MercExchange and correct the company's description and number of employees.
It had to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and back again, but a long-running patent dispute between eBay and a three-man e-commerce technology company finally appears to be over.
Since 2001, the Virginia-based MercExchange had been at war with the auction giant. It alleged that the Silicon Valley company's online auction interface--namely, its "Buy It Now" feature, which allows users to purchase items without going through the bidding process--infringed upon three of its patents. At the time the dispute began, MercExchange ran three Web sites, including a fine art auction site, and had 45 employees.
The terms of the settlement announced Thursday are confidential, but it may have been a lucrative deal for MercExchange. eBay said in a press release that it agreed to purchase all three patents at issue, as well as "some additional related technology and inventions and a license to another search-related patent portfolio that was not asserted in the lawsuit."
eBay said it was "pleased" to reach the agreement and to have the chance to expand its intellectual property portfolio. It predicted the transaction would have any effect on its 2007 results or 2008 financial guidance.
MercExchange spokesman Michael Caputo said his company was also "happy" with the agreement and looked forward to moving onto other projects.
A federal jury in 2003 found eBay guilty of infringing on two of those patents and ordered it to pay more than $25 million in damages. An appeals court upheld that verdict and also imposed an injunction on eBay, which required it to cease using the technology found to have infringed on the patents.
eBay appealed that decision all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in its favor in spring 2006. The justices issued a landmark decision last May designed to make it more difficult for patent holders to get courts to sign off on shutoffs of infringing products. Critics have argued that patent-holding companies use the threat of injunctions to extract disproportionate settlement awards from companies accused of infringing their wares--a practice known as
From there, the matter was sent back to a district court to revisit, where a judge ruled last summer that monetary damages were enough to compensate MercExchange for any difficulties it had endured as a result of the patent infringement.
Perhaps ironically, eBay in the past has challenged the validity of some of the very patents it admittedly just purchased--and even won an initial round of that re-examination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
The three patents at issue are Patent No. 5,845,265, Patent No. 6,085,176, and Patent No. 6,202,051.
Microsoft is revealing more details about new features in its Office for Mac 2008 suite, due for a release early next year.
Excel 2008 for Mac will offer worksheet templates with baked-in calculations designed to make it easier to balance household finances, manage inventory and other common tasks. The new Ledger Sheets features will include a gallery of elements, shifting formulas to the background.
In addition, the Entourage e-mail client will offer more support for Microsoft Exchange, which traditionally has enabled non-Mac PC users to make appointments and share notes and files with each other.
Each version of Office for Mac will cost about a dollar more than the 2004 editions. The $149 package will lack Exchange capabilities, while $399 buys the works: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Exchange-ready Entourage.
A friend and I were discussing the state of software adoption yesterday. Our kids were floating down a river toward us, and we had plenty of time to talk about our respective companies as the kids kept repeating the trip.
It struck both of us that the problem with enterprise software is that it tends to forget how people actually work. Things like CRM, ECM, etc., tend to require users to change their normal behavior to fit the application. As a result, they tend to not get used, or at least not unless someone threatens to withhold compensation.
In the Web 2.0 world, Tim O'Reilly has spent the last few years advocating "architectures of participation" (meaning, as Tim further clarifies, that "users pursuing their own 'selfish' interests build collective value as an automatic byproduct" of their participation). But in most enterprise software, users must spin extra cycles to provide group value, e.g., they spend all day in e-mail or on the phone but then have to go to a Web page to record their sales activities in a CRM system.
Surely we're missing something.
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