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Microsoft's mobility power play
Mobile-enabled servers and services
By Tim Landgrave
TechRepublic
July 15, 2003
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Mobile-enabled servers and services
With a newly designed connection manager, it’s now trivial to make a connection to the corporate network or to the Internet. And to secure the connection, WM2k3 adds support for multiple VPNs, 802.1x, IPSec L2TP tunnels, and encryption, using 128-bit SSL and/or 128-bit CAPI. WM2k3 devices have all the necessary protocol support required to connect securely to a company’s internal network.
In addition to the simple file access and terminal services support inherent in its device, Microsoft is also introducing key new Server and Services functionality later this year. At its annual TechEd conference in early June, Microsoft distributed a copy of Release Candidate 1 of its upcoming Exchange Server 2003. In just under four hours, I installed a configuration with Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 that allowed me to remotely synchronize my Pocket PC device directly from the server without requiring a desktop with ActiveSync loaded. Using either the Pocket PC Phone edition or a wireless connection card from a mobile carrier, you can use this functionality to continuously maintain your e-mail, appointments, and contacts using the wireless cell network.
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At TechEd, Microsoft also discussed other key technologies that would help corporations take advantage of the new mobile OS. With the MapPoint Web Service, customers using a Pocket PC can get maps, driving directions, routing instructions, and other services delivered directly to their mobile device. Microsoft is also working with the wireless carriers to provide an Enterprise Location Server, which will allow companies to marry the MapPoint services with current positioning retrieved from the device. This would allow, for example, a Pocket PC user to query a service that finds the closest restaurant or gas station based on the phone’s location as calculated by the service provider, but deliver the data to a service provider in a format that can be easily consumed and integrated into a mapping or presence-based application.
The development platform
The development platform is the real key to this mobile power play--putting tools into the hands of developers that extend beyond the device. For the last year and a half, Microsoft has been focused on standardizing key elements of its Pocket PC and SmartPhone technology and shipping that core code in the current version of Windows CE .NET. That work has been delivered now with WM2k3 and will be delivered in the SmartPhone platform later in the year. But the key driver for a new application on the WM2k3 platform will be the integration of the .NET Compact Framework into the mobile OS.
By delivering the .NET Compact Framework as a standard element in the WM2k3 platform, Microsoft will enable millions of VB developers to begin building applications for an entirely new platform. It was the availability of VB 1.0 that launched the Windows 3.x platform in the early '90s by dramatically expanding the number of applications for the platform. Now both corporate and commercial VB.NET (and C#) developers will be able to create robust, highly performing applications for the Windows Mobile platform. And this is Microsoft at its best--building development platforms that allow companies to create new classes of applications that change the way we think about and use technology.
TechRepublic originally published this article on 15 July 2003
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