Microsoft, Lotus Move To Integrate Mobile E-Mail Support

Microsoft hopes to ship to beta this fall an interim release of Exchange Server, code-named Titanium, which will meld support for mobile devices into the mail server. Microsoft previously offered Mobile Information Server as a separate product.

IBM's Lotus Software group will beat Microsoft to the punch with Domino 6, if it ships as planned this quarter with integrated mobile device support. Previously, Lotus supported handheld devices and phones via Lotus Everyplace, a separate product, said Ed Brill, senior manager of solutions marketing at Lotus.

Not to be outdone, Oracle two weeks ago launched its own assault on corporate e-mail with Oracle Collaboration Suite, due by year's end. Oracle said its offering will tie together e-mail, realtime conferencing, voice-mail and workflow, all accessible from a Microsoft Outlook client. Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison heralded the company's e-mail attack last November at Comdex, claiming that Oracle's relational database is a more secure foundation for e-mail than the data store used by Exchange Server.

While some solution providers agree that Oracle's technology has some security advantages, they said the company has failed to crack the mail server market before.

"It's hard to take Oracle seriously. They've done this before with Oracle Mail but never really promoted it. They've established a pattern of selling add-on products to their captive audience. While that makes sense for Oracle, it doesn't strike me as a major industry event," said Ron Herardian, CEO of e-mail integrator Global System Services, Mountain View, Calif.

Solution providers agreed with Microsoft's own assessment of Titanium as an evolutionary release to fill the gap between Exchange Server 2000 and the more radical Kodiak release, which will swap out the Exchange data store for a relational model based on Yukon, a future version of SQL Server.

Neil Richards, CEO of Hunter Stone, a Columbia, S.C., solution provider, said he liked the new three-pane Outlook 11 user interface demonstrated by Microsoft but wondered how the integrated mobile support would affect users of BlackBerry devices and other handhelds that don't run Microsoft operating systems.

Titanium's goal is to make the mail experience as consistent as possible, whether the user is at a desktop or using a small device, said Chris Baker, lead product manager at Microsoft.