Nokia Targets the BlackBerry Market With MS Exchange, Communicator and Sharepoint Integration

Entrance to Tech.Ed Europe 2010

I just got back from Berlin where I attended Microsoft Tech.Ed Europe along with Mike Maddaloni (thehotiron.com) and Craig Richards  (geekcomputers.co.uk) as the guests of WOMWorld/Nokia.

Tech.Ed is a series of annual conferences that Microsoft holds  around the world. It’s primarily a technical training  event but there are also high level keynote sessions covering Microsoft and partner’s products, services and strategies and a large Expo floor where many companies  have booths promoting their development tools and enterprise products and services. The majority of attendees at Tech.Ed seemed to be corporate developers and IT folks.

Nokia is a Tech.Ed sponsor and they had a big booth at Tech.Ed where they showed off Symbian’s strong integration with Microsoft enterprise services and the recently announced E7 business smartphone.

Nokia's Ukko Lappalainen Presents at Tech.Ed 2010

Ukko Lappalainen, VP for E Series and Workspace Productivity, delivered Nokia’s keynote at Tech.Ed. He focused on the results of the year old partnership between Microsoft and Nokia. The two companies have used that time to improve the implementation of Microsoft’s Enterprise Solutions, including Exchange, Communicator and Sharepoint on Nokia devices. The result is a strong competitor  to RIM, Apple and Android in the business mobility area.

Contrary to popular belief, the BlackBerry  is not the leader in enterprise email. According to Ukko 71.5% of mobile access to corporate email is powered by Microsoft Exchange, compared with only 16.1% for RIM and 5.9% for IBM’s Lotus Notes.

Mobile Email Market Share

The Mail for Exchange client for Nokia Symbian devices provides push email and real-time calendar, tasks and contacts synchronization. The client comes  pre-installed on all current E Series devices and is available as a free download from the Ovi Store for most other Symbian smartphones.

Nokia’s support for Microsoft Enterprise services is not limited to email either. Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Symbian lets users securely access corporate instant messaging. The client supports presence meaning users can see their contact’s status (available, busy or offline) in real-time.

Nokia’s E series phones include the full version of Quick Office which supports editing, viewing  and creation of  Microsoft Office 2007 documents.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 provides access to Sharepoint sites, lists, blogs, document libraries, search and version control with mobile formatted pages optimized for the Nokia browser.

A significant advantage of the Microsoft/Nokia solution is lower cost of ownership. There’s a savings on device costs as basic Symbian business smartphones like the E63 and E5 have a price advantage over similar BlackBerrys.  But the bigest savings is on the back end. If a business is already using Exchange, Communicator or Sharepoint, no additional hardware or licenses are required to provide mobile access. Ukko presented  a case study of how JCDecaux (PDF), the big Paris based multi-national outdoor advertising company was able to reduce costs and increase employee productivity with Nokia. Decaux had been giving BlackBerrys, to 14% of their key employees. By replacing the Blackberrys for a sub-set of employees with Nokia E63s for everyone, Decaux was able give mobile push email to 100% of their employees while reducing costs and increasing workforce productivy

There are a number of other reasons for businesses to use Nokia devices.  Ovi Maps provides employees with free mapping and navigation including lifetime free map and POI updates. Its vector based maps and ability to work offline using local maps mean less data consumption and allow Ovi Maps work reliability in areas with a weak or no signal. Symbian provides unmatched security, including remote handset configuration and the ability to remotely lock or wipe a lost or stolen phone. Companies can reduce their environmental impact by choosing Nokia, which has the greenest  range of handsets in the business.

Ukko showed off the soon to be released Nokia E7 which he called the ultimate business smartphone. I got a chance to play with several E7 prototypes on the Nokia stand.   The E7 has  the styling and  quality materials of the N8 but is noticeably heavier and a bit larger in every dimension. In return for the extra bulk and size you you get a roomy, four row, slide out QWERTY keyboard and a four inch screen (vs. 3.5 inches on the N8). I really liked the keyboard which has large, well spaced keys with good tactile feedback. Like the N8, the E7 has an HDMI TV-out port for showing presentations on the big screen and USB on the Go which lets you connect and use thumb drives, USB keyboards, mice and most other low power USB devices with the phone.

I’m excited about the E7 which Nokia says will begin shipping around Christmas in some markets with world wide availability in early 2011.

Nokia

Disclaimer: My expenses for the trip to Tech.Ed, including airfare, hotel, meals, drinks, and admission to the conference were paid for by the 1000heads agency on behalf of Nokia. However, the opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

5 thoughts on “Nokia Targets the BlackBerry Market With MS Exchange, Communicator and Sharepoint Integration

  1. Details are sparse on the level of SharePoint integration. The article leads me to believe that it’s just a special edition of “/m” output that works better in Nokia browsers. So, it’ll be completely HTML/browser-based?

  2. Pingback: Can Nokia Enterprise Solutions stand up to Blackberry? | WOMWorld/Nokia

  3. Welcome back! Any feedback on the current implementation of Microsoft Exchange on the N8? Lots of bugs right?! How come and will they be fixed anytime soon?

    • I asked about the two MfE issues I’m aware of; buggy Gmail support and that MfE doesn’t support multiple Exchange servers.

      According to the Nokia people I spoke to, the Gmail problems, which include the inability to reply or create new messages and error messages receiving html emails, are due to Google’s faulty implementation of the Exchange protocol. Apparently Google is not using a real Exchange server but has created something that works like one but not perfectly. I got the impression that Nokia was not planning to work around Google’s bugs. They are working on improving Nokia Messenger’s Gmail support.

      Nokia is aware the the single Exchange server limitation in MfE is an issue for some users and is looking at resolving it.

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