Here’s a question I hear regularly “So what PDA should I get and can I connect it to our network?”  I can offer that I’ve seen just about every variation of PDA over the last 10 years from the first Blackberry’s, Treo’s, Motorola Q’s up to the most current iPhones, Droids, Windows 7 phones and the latest Blackberry’s.  They have come a long way since the first devices and are easier than ever to integrate with your corporate networks.   M3’s staff uses a combination of Blackberry’s and Droid based phones.  The iPhones, Droid’s and Windows 7 phones are by far the easiest to integrate into a corporate network because of their built in synchronization options.  They all work well with the wireless carriers in the area and have both cellular wireless connectivity (3G or 4G) and WiFi connectivity (Wireless such that you would use with your laptop to connect at home or in the office).  Each phone has their benefits and really falls on the person using it and the comfort level they have with the interface.

The Blackberry based phones are somewhat of a different animal in the way they connect to corporate networks.  From the beginning Blackberry developed the phones to be enterprise devices that can be managed remotely from a central server.  This allows the corporate IT department to control all aspects of the phone and configure connectivity to your enterprise email system.  Blackberry’s are used in many corporate environments because of the control the IT staff can have over the phones and the ability to remotely wipe the phones if a phone is lost or stolen.  I’ve had to use this feature once and it worked perfectly.  However, the drawback of a blackberry comes from this connectivity.  It requires server side software that can be difficult to configure and maintain as well as needing the IT resources available to support the software.

The commonality of all of the current PDA’s is some sort of email client that can connect to your personal and corporate email accounts.  Since so many of our customers use Microsoft Exchange as their corporate email system I will focus there.  The iPhone, Droid and Windows 7 use a technology called ActiveSync.  This allows you to sync your email, calendar and contacts with your Microsoft Exchange mailbox (Microsoft Outlook and Webmail).  There can be some initial set up on the server side to allow this connectivity but once its in place there is no additional configuration except the initial set up on the phone.  It works very well and requires almost no management from the IT staff.  The Blackberry uses a slightly different technology as I mentioned above which requires a Blackberry Enterprise Server and special software and configuration.  Once set up it has the same capabilities as ActiveSync including email, calendar and contacts sync.  Typically synchronization of tasks and notes is also available.

So what’s your favorite phone Joe?  I have a Motorola Droid and don’t plan on giving it up any time soon!  To those Blackberry users, I had one to for about 7 years and loved it too.