Contacts: Gwabbit
Price: Free (paid version: $9.99/year)

Say goodbye to cutting and pasting contacts one field at a time from your emails into your address book. Gwabbit automatically scans incoming BlackBerry emails, finds contacts, and transforms them into contact records within your address book. This award-winning technology monitors opened emails, and if they include the signature of the sender, the information is sent to the server for processing. The server then returns the results to the client and if a signature is found, the client prompts the user and asks if the user wants to save the contact information. Gwabbit is compatible with current generation BlackBerry devices with 4.2 OS and higher.

Documents: Documents To Go
Price: $49.99

Documents To Go gives users the ability to view, edit and create Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and attachments as well as view PDF files all on their BlackBerry smartphones. In a recent study conducted by Brighthand, they found that Documents To Go does a significantly better job of handling Word and Excel documents than  a Pocket PC using Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. Documents To Go includes Slideshow To Go, which supports Microsoft PowerPoint presentations (something Microsoft does not offer in its Pocket Office suite).

Management: Maximizer Mobile CRM Software (Blackberry OS 4.6 or higher)
Price: $229

Maximizer ‘s mobile CRM software is simple to use and manage and gives you real-time wireless access to your entire Maximizer CRM database. This means access to all your business accounts, sales deals, notes, leads, sales opportunities, service cases and schedules all while you’re on- the-go. You can monitor the status of your business and team performance with real-time dashboards and reports on your BlackBerry. It can work as a stand-alone CRM program, or with your company’s desktop and browser-based products.

Finances: Expense Manager
Price: $14.99

Expense Manager by Total Wireless Solutions helps you keep track of your daily expenses. It supports multiple accounts and generates customized expense reports which are then transferred by email or saved to a memory card for integration with Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets. You can set a monthly budget for each account, category and payment method so not only is it helping you track your expenses, it is also an effective budgeting tool.

Sherweb also offers hosted Blackberry services so that businesses of all sizes can synchronize wirelessly to Outlook and get instant access to e-mails, calendars, notes, tasks and contacts, with encrypted technology that secures all information.

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Sherweb for instance, is one of the few hosting providers to include advanced protection free of charge with every hosted exchange mailbox. Sherweb protects its clients with its free anti-spam and antivirus technology that combines MailChannels Traffic Control with Cloudmark intelligent content filtering technology. Traffic Control reduces spam at the connection layer by up to 98%. Traffic Control also stops spam based on the reputation of email senders, rather than the content of messages. The Cloudmark spam detection engine is also quite innovative in that it relies on the collective intelligence of 180 million reporting sources from the Cloudmark Global Threat Network. This provides an extremely rapid response to new and mutating threats.

Here are some top reviewed anti-spam programs that will ensure the best protection against unwanted SPAM.

SPAMfighter

SPAMfighter ranked #1 out of 10 spam filter products which were reviewed and compared on Top Ten Reviews. A community-based spam filter allows users to blacklist or whitelist incoming emails. This means that if a particular email address or domain is blacklisted by a certain number of members of the SPAM fighting community, it will be banned forever. Some highlights of this software include protection against phishing, identity theft and other types of email fraud, protection of all the email accounts on your PC as well as recognition of spam sent as pictures.

CA Anti-Spam Software

CA Anti-Spam software, (former Qurb Anti-Spam software, which won PC Magazine Editor’s Choice for three years running), works immediately upon installation following a quick download. CA Anti-Spam automatically builds your whitelist of approved senders by scanning your saved/sent email and has tight integration with Outlook and Outlook Express. You can download the free 15 day trial and if you are happy with the software you can buy it for $29.99.

Email Remover

Email Remover connects to your ISP and retrieves mail header information (sender, subject, date, etc…) letting you pick mail you don’t want to receive and deleting it from the mail server. It will optionally run your regular email client when it’s done so that you can transfer and read the mail you do want. Best of all, it’s free.

Cloudmark Desktop

Though mentioned briefly at the beginning, Cloudmark is specifically for Outlook / Outlook Express users, and relies on the collective opinion of over one million+ users. Cloudmark will inconspicuously work away removing unwanted mail from your Inbox. One of the best features about this product is that it will never delete your genuine personal mail by incorrectly classifying it as spam. The Cloudmark networking approach catches phishing hoaxes as well as spam.

ChoiceMail

With ChoiceMail you can accept and reject emails by domain, IP address, or block email from known spam senders. ChoiceMail assumes everything is spam until you grant permission to let it through. You may find the setup process a little long and tedious at first. Once you’re done however, you will find that this is a worthwhile tool. ChoiceMail has some built-in rules but also allows you to create your own. Overall, the program does an excellent job controlling spam using a permission-based method. This product costs $29.95.

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Over the last few years, SherWeb has developed an exclusive Control Panel using unique proprietary .NET technologies. One of SherWeb’s most used web interface, it allows customers to easily and intuitively manage their Hosted Exchange, SharePoint, CRM, mobile and BlackBerry synchronization. SherWeb’s team of developers is always on the lookout to update and improve it. The original Control Panel was revamped this winter with a new interface and improved features.

So far, users have not been informed of updates made to the Control Panel, but from now on, we intend to regularly blog about new versions and updates. To make sure these posts don’t become confusing, we will identify them by version number.

The following features were added in version 2.10 published two weeks ago and in version 2.11 published this week.

1. New distribution list features (2.11)
2. BlackBerry wiping (2.11)
3. SharePoint URL reminder (2.10)
4. Organization summary page (2.10)
5. Manager and direct reports (2.10)
6. BlackBerry PIN message

New distribution list features (2.11)

You can now change the display name for all of your distribution lists, which will also change the name displayed in the Outlook address book. You also have the ability to grant or deny permissions on your distribution lists; allowing you to determine who can send messages to a specific distribution list. A select/deselect all checkbox has been added to the “manage members” page as well.

BlackBerry wiping (2.11)

This feature has been requested a few times by our customers. It has been added to the BlackBerry command list in a user’s home page and allows you to wipe a device clean.

SharePoint URL reminder (2.10)

Every user of an organization can now see the organization’s SharePoint URL on the Control Panel’s home page when they log in.

Organization summary page (2.10)

Want to know what’s going on with your organization? The summary page gives you a one-glance view of how many Exchange mailboxes you have, which plan they are using, and which mailstore they are on. It’s a quick way to make an inventory of your assets and a useful tool to understand what you pay for.

Manager and direct reports (2.10)

This handy feature allows you to set a user’s manager. The changes are reflected through Outlook’s user property page and through the Control Panel’s user property page.

BlackBerry PIN message

A very useful feature that has been on our Control Panel for a while but doesn’t get much attention. It allows you to send a PIN message to a user’s BlackBerry device. A PIN message has the same format as an email, the speed of an SMS message, but it doesn’t go through Exchange and doesn’t cost a thing. The BlackBerry server receives the message and immediately pushes it to the device. You can also send a message to an organization, through the organization’s main page, in the BlackBerry section.

Although it is only a few months old, SherWeb’s new Control Panel is already a mature project. It is developed and fixed as soon as feature requests and bugs come in. The development team works closely with the support team to ensure they can efficiently serve our customers and make sure our clients have the best user experience with our products.

by Christian Droulers. A software developer at SherWeb, Christian works mainly on the Control Panel. He has been with the company since April 2008.

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Not only does this new software version offer peace of mind with a stable platform engineered to meet the demands of mission critical enterprise environments, it offers the end-user great features such as the ability to:

• Flag emails for follow-up
• Forward calendar entries
• Manage personal folders
• View and manage personal contact subfolders
• View and use contacts in public folders
• Listen to .wma files

Starting now, BES 5.0 will be available to all our Hosted Exchange 2007 users. SherWeb’s Hosted BlackBerry solution allows businesses of all sizes to benefit from wireless synchronization without having to invest large sums of money on server hardware, software and ongoing IT support involved with managing a BlackBerry Enterprise Server internally.

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Email, as a means of electronically sending messages between two people, is said to have began at MIT in the 1960s. The system was crude, and basically amounted to different users leaving notes for each other stored on the same shared computer. This was a precursor to today’s method of sending an email across a network, which, incidentally, was created not too much later.

The First Network Email

The backbone of our current email system began with ARPANET, near the end of 1971, by Ray Tomlinson, an ARPANET contractor working for Bolk Beranek and Newman. ARPANET was the network created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense during the Cold War. Tomlinson’s goal was to take his existing basic messaging system, SNGMSG, and take it to the next logical evolution, indicating for a given message which user was at which of the network’s computers.

At its core, email isn’t too different from regular mail. When you send a letter to someone, you indicate two things on the outside in order to get it where you want it to go: the name of the intended recipient, and the presumed current location of said recipient. Tomlinson came up with an elegant way of designating these two parts with the adoption of the @ symbol. His system, familiar to all of us now, identifies the recipient before the symbol, the location after. While the location referred to a particular computer at the time, the location now refers to the domain at which a mail server is hosted, a bit like sending a letter to an apartment building, and you leave it to the building administration to get the note to the right person. There’s a popular myth that the first email ever written was “qwertyuiop”, but actually was some forgettable test text that Tomlinson himself can’t remember.

Email Exchange Today

The principles behind the ARPANET extended to the Internet that followed. Messages are now sent via a local electronic mail server, which then relays to the intended destination using SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, read using Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) which access the mail server that received the message. Many companies have local mail servers of this kind, which manage the incoming and outgoing messages workers send and receive internally or from outside their network. The next step, which many companies have started to take, uses services like Microsoft Exchange Hosting. While local mail servers get the basic job done, numerous factors make hosting a mail server off-site a safer option. A hosted exchange service, in short, acts as an intermediary between senders outside the network and those within, offering an added layer of protection to catch SPAM, viruses, and other junk or dangerous email. Also, the infrastructures of the kinds of companies that offer a hosted exchange service, for instance, Microsoft Sharepoint Hosting allow pretty much guaranteed uptime and security over a cloud-computing network, far more stable than a company’s local mailserver. No offense to affected IT workers! It’s nice to know that in the event of a robbery, fire, or anything else horrible, that stolen or destroyed equipment doesn’t mean lost data.

The Future

One possible direction for email could be towards using XMPP instead of SMTP. Anarchogeek explains the situation well, basically that instant messenger services use a means of transferring information that is highly permission-based (because of invited friends), usually resulting in less junk and more quick and pure communication. There are critical mass issues to overcome in making a transition away from something as prevalent and accepted as SMTP, but XMPP could very well be the next step in electronic mail.

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