This article is the continuation of the “6 Types of Exchange Clients and Their Protocols (Part I)“, this article will help us to understand the clients that are used for Non-Conventional systems.
Introduction:
Microsoft Exchange Systems has protocols in-built for the client connectivity of non-windows based systems like Apple Mac etc. Now let’s continue with Clients & Protocols.
Outlook 2011: Outlook 2011 was exclusively introduced for Apple Computers running MAC OS. Outlook 2011 uses EWS protocol. EWS stands for Exchange Web Services. It is a generic protocol used by many other clients to communicate with Exchange Systems, since EWS provides linear and non-MAPI connection. Sharepoint also uses EWS to communicate with the Exchange Store to access the site mailboxes and its contents. Lync is one another client that uses EWS to fetch the contact details through Exchange Systems. So as far as MAC is concerned, there is not a big trouble in upgrading.
Outlook for Mobile: Outlook for Mobile is a common term used for clients available to the various mobiles, tablets and iPads. Microsoft has two options for the handheld devices to connect to Exchange Systems. They are Outlook Web App for Mobile and Active Sync. Active Sync was the first developed protocol for mobile phones and handheld devices to connect, however OWA for mobile is also becoming popular these days. It has become the native mail client application for Apple iPad and iPhone. However iPad and iPhone also supports ActiveSync. OWA for mobile does not rely on active sync and instead it uses Exchange Web Services (EWS) and HTML.
Initially companies used to provide smart phones to their employees for accessing emails, so it was easy to manage the company provided phones through third party MDM, but now smart phones have evolved a lot and every hand has a smart phone. So Exchange ActiveSync users have grown drastically in the recent years, so managing these devices has become difficult for the IT administrators as newer devices has new and spike in the cost involved to deploy and manage. Hence Microsoft has introduced a new platform called Mobile Device Management (MDM) which applies policies to the mobile and manage it efficiently. So administrators should be aware of the latest phones and OS that is used to access emails. Every time when a new iOS is released there will be one or more problems from connectivity to calendars. So while upgrading your Exchange or MDM (Mobile device management) we should be careful.
IMAP & POP3: The last category of clients that still uses the old protocol of POP and IMAP, Microsoft has never spent much time or resources on this and hence we don’t see much of development in these protocols. This is commonly used by UNIX and Linux systems.
Conclusion:
Here comes the big question of choosing the client. It will be easy to answer this question for a smaller organization, but for a considerably bigger company we have to be careful. As we go to the latest clients certain old features would have been discontinued or modified. Our users might not have the understanding or the capability to accept these changes immediately and also as a good IT team we should not force the users to use misunderstood features. So the best way is to make the changes from the TOP Management as the information and technology would flow down easily from the managers to their reportees. Using of new outlook version is no harm as we always have the option of OST 2 PST file conversion.
Author Introduction:
Sophia Mao is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including repair pst email problem and word recovery software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com
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