Evolution – Mobile Me and the rest of the world ..

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Ok, it’s been launched and a lot of the hype has died down. Or has it?

It’s not often that Apple follows instead of leading, and many may argue that mobile me is a “‘follow Microsoft” step, but from our opinion here at Aquafruit, that’s not the case.

What is mobile me? Apple totes it as “Exchange for the rest of us”. In a nutshell, it’s email, contact and calendar collaboration with the need to pay exorbitant amounts of $$ for licensing hardware infrastructure.

That is, you don’t need to buy a whole server and Microsoft Exchange environment to receive the same benefits.

But, Apple has gone a little further by combining online storage and picture galleries as well as the exchange collaboration environment.

It’s interesting to note, that as a potential “personal” exchange server option, there are still a few bugs and issues that need to be looked into (see the techy section).

Browse through the web and you can read all about it – the “issues” and “problems” with Mobile me. Fair enough. Microsoft didn’t get it right the first time either!

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Mobile Me (MM)- in Perspective.

Let’s look at MM and see how it works. First off, syncing iCal / Entourage / Outlook with MM is pretty straight forward. Configure MM on either you Mac or PC and follow the wizard.

For those of you using Mac, it will be in your system preferences (see screen shot below) and for the PC, in the control panel.

The complete configuration details from Apple are here: http://www.apple.com/mobileme/setup/

For Entourage people, there is a work around as MM will not sync with Entourage (yet!). You will need to sync entourage to iCal to MM and then MM to your other devices. ** Note, Entourage and iCal sync both ways – so iCal can just act as the conduit.

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** Things you need to know **

Syncing with windows – you don’t need to do anything – other than update iTunes, open control panel and configure Mobile Me.

** Problems. For those of us using Exchange accounts, people are encountering issues with syncing their exchange mail box with MM.

After a little investigation, it looks like this issue is mainly with Vista. For more information, see http://www.apple.com/support/

Mac and iSync
For the Mac people, you may encounter issues with syncing – and need to reset syncing on a regular basis. I have come across this issue quite a lot and find it annoying.

As iSync is used as the primary sync conduit, it may have something to do with multiple mobile phones being active at the same time.

Stability
It’s a known fact that there are stability issues with Mobile me at the moment. As expected will all services, there will be teething issues. More information on the current status of MM and current issues is available here: http://www.apple.com/mobileme/status/

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Google apps?
I’ve been playing around with this one a little. Spanning sync and busy sync for the mac side of things almost work. Google has an iPhone app and a windows plugin that look pretty good at this stage, but I haven’t finished testing them as of yet.

More information is available here: http://m.google.com/

What about Exchange?
Connecting to and syncing with Exchange Server 2003 and above is pretty straight forward – from your iPhone to Exchange that is .. not to MM. Whilst the calendar side of either Mac or PC to MM is straight forward – I believe that more testing in volatile environments is required.
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In Conclusion.
Mobile Me looks pretty good. Let’s see what happens next!.

Warm regards,
Scott Malpass
Aquafruit Media.