Windows Phone Thoughts: "Solving the Phone Sync Problem End-To-End": Tech Details On Microsoft's New Push Email

"...we offered an always up-to-date (AUTD) solution based on text messaging at that time, but I wasn’t happy with what was required in terms of provisioning and the server-side enforcement of latency so as to mitigate the impact of AUTDv1 on server performance. What to do. Around this time, we had begun looking into what it would take to offer an up-to-date mobile email solution ("AUTD," from here on) that competed with the likes of RIM, Good, et al. I liked the up-to-date nature of their solutions but had not personally adopted them for reasons of device choice (again with the form factor), setup costs (in terms of money, deployment overhead, and operational overhead), or both. Being on the Exchange team, we’ve always got two sets of customers: the administrative staff and end users, and we wanted to build a solution that worked well for both."

This is an excellent technical post on how exactly the new push email mechanism in Exchange 2003 SP2 interfaces with Windows Mobile 5.0's Messaging and Security Feature Pack. For those of you who are sysadmins, you'll definitely want to read this (as well as Geekzone's thoughts on the subject, linked to as the Source). Highlights include the fact that the solution they've designed doesn't need any access except on ports 80 and 443. I can't wait to see how this works in practice, but the design as stated sounds pretty thorough. 8)