Chapter 45. Making Outlook Mobile

In the past, mobile users were much the exception rather than the rule. Today, users often work from home, from the road, and from remote offices. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and smartphones are more and more common. All of these things make the mobility features built into Microsoft® Exchange Server and Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 extremely important.

This chapter covers Office Outlook 2007 mobility features. For example, new in Outlook 2007 is the Mobile Service Account provider, which integrates Outlook 2007 with your mobile phone service. You’ll learn in this chapter to configure the Mobile Service Account, send text messages, and use other mobile service features.

This chapter also explores Outlook Anywhere, also known as RPC over HTTP (remote procedure call over Hypertext Transfer Protocol), to enable users to connect to Exchange Server across the Internet. Outlook Anywhere enables administrators to provide remote access to Exchange Server without resorting to virtual private network (VPN) connections or exposing their networks to attack by opening the otherwise-required ports in the firewall.

Before we look at the mobility features offered by Exchange Server and Outlook 2007, let’s take a look at mobility in general.

Why Mobility Is Important

In modern offices, the requirement for mobility has increased dramatically with the introduction of technologies such as high-speed broadband Internet connections to the home, the proliferation of wireless Internet connections, and sending data over cellular connections. Employee expectations have changed with these technologies, especially among those workers who are frequently out of the office on business, such as sales teams and executives. These users expect that they will be able to access their e-mail and other collaboration information whether they are in a hotel, at the airport, at a customer site, or at a remote office.

Along with the expectation that they can access their mail, mobile users are looking for more functionality while on the road than simple mail access. With Outlook 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 providing full collaboration functionality as outlined elsewhere in this book, simple Web mail is not enough to satisfy these users’ requirements. Most mobile users now want full access to all of these features from outside the office too.

Mobility features are important for a number of reasons. However, the driving force behind the implementation of all mobility features and products is that they increase the speed of doing business and improve productivity. Mobility solutions, especially those integrated with collaboration products such as Outlook 2007 and Exchange Server, provide this speed and allow employees to conduct business from disparate locations. In a nutshell, e-mail has become the primary mechanism for conducting business in many companies. Anytime/anywhere access to that e-mail, as well as chat and other collaboration capabilities, is crucial.

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