Open-Xchange’s OXtender for Business Mobility enables users to “receive push e-mail and synchronization of contacts, calendar and other information from their Open-Xchange [accounts] to their smartphones, including Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Nokia, Windows Mobile [phones] and others,” Open-Xchange said in a news release Sept. 29.
The new capability is enabled by Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. “Open-Xchange selected the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol for synchronization due to the wide range of supported handhelds and smartphones. This ensures that any ActiveSync client on a mobile device can set up and start using mobile e-mail and PIM (personal information manager) functions without complex configuration-and without Microsoft Exchange Server. In addition, software clients for almost all other platforms, including Symbian-based devices, BlackBerry [and] Google Android, are available,” the company said in the release.
“Most current solutions are [either] limited … to specific smartphones or require costly proprietary server solutions,” Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna said. “The OXtender for Business Mobility provides users with easy-to-use mobile messaging and collaboration capabilities on all the devices they use-anywhere, any time, at a reasonable cost.”
Other features of OXtender for Business Mobility include “end-to-end encrypted e-mail and PIM data push; end-to-end encrypted over-the-air synchronization of personal contacts, calendar and tasks;” end-to-end encrypted over-the-air synchronization of global address book; “account management directly from the mobile device; [and] Single-Sign-On (SSO) management,” according to the company. The release continued:
““Open-Xchange’s collaboration solutions offer the full set of PIM functionality … together with advanced groupware features such as Documail and Smart Document Sharing. With OXtender for Business Mobility, small businesses and individuals have a cost-effective solution [with which] to work remotely [that] is comparable to the capabilities of users at large enterprises.”Open-Xchange is installed by more than 3,500 companies and organizations worldwide with the Open-Xchange Hosting Edition used by more than 10 million users worldwide as hosted business-class e-mail, along with personal information management (PIM), and full groupware. …”OXtender for Business Mobility is available for Open-Xchange Server Edition and Open-Xchange Appliance Edition from Open-Xchange and its partners. License and software subscription for 25 users including updates, patches and security fixes is $355 … per year. Additional users cost $14.22 … in the first year. Software subscription for the following years is 25 percent of the cost for the first year.”“