Smartphone preference for zimbra?

[jonnyRo]

What's the current easiest to use smartphone with the Zimbra Suite?

We're shopping around for a bunch of smartphones for the office, and I dont want to be pushed into a situation where we have to go to using MS Exchange to support this, not after we got Zimbra working so wonderfully.

We have been looking at the Motorla Q, the Treo 700w, and the blackberry's

[KevinH]

Here at Zimbra we love two phones. The Moto Q and the Nokia E61. The later you can get good deals in the US @ plemix.com See Satish's blog post for more info:

http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/..._mobile_1.html

The Treo 700w worked, but as a phone wasn't the best we've seen.

[alandrew]

Seconded on the nokia E61

I've just dumped the blackberry after being offered an E61 as a free upgrade on an unrelated mobile contract.

I upped my Zimbra install from 3.1.something to 4.0.3 OSS which was a cakewalk
then realised that I had to have network edition to sync properly, dl'ed the trial,
installed over OSS, and followed the destructions on the wiki for nokia e61

done

so cool, I'm now feverishly figuring out how I can get the funding to carry me beyond my trial.

[greenrenault]

I agree the Nokia E61 is a great device and sync'ing with Zimbra Mobile "just works". Nokia were correct in calling this phone the "blackberry killer". We bought two test E61's and they worked great for the first 8 hours. And then both just stopped sync'ing, it was totally bizarre and very frustrating.

Looking at our HTTP Apache logs we could see that OWA requests were not even being sent from the phone to Zimbra. If everything is working, you'll see entries like this.

192.168.0.162 - - [24/Oct/2006:14:24:49 +1000] "OPTIONS /Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync?User=zimbra-company\\bill+gates&DeviceId=IMEI356213000206887&D eviceType=NokiaE61 HTTP/1.1" 401 1038 "-" "NokiaE61/1.0"

But when it breaks you'll just receive an error on your Nokia like: "Error communicating with server" Or some other useless message.

So to cut a long story short, I believe (and many others) that there is a bug in "the Nokia software" (not sure if it's Mail For Exchange, the operating system or something else possibly Access Manager). But there are a lot of *very pissed off* Nokia E61 users out there in the World who have this problem. The problem is not Zimbra, it's Nokia.

The Nokia only comes with a very limited set of SSL root certificates (an oversight Nokia?) and there are many reports from people who believe this causes Mail for Exchange to corrupt after 20 or so syncs.

Installing the root SSL certificates for the SSL certificate you are using on the Nokia will stop the request to "trust the connection" each time Nokia syncs and will avoid the corruption / does not sync anymore problem. So if you are using either a self-signed or commercial SSL certificate then I highly recommend you do this - save your sanity!

After many hours of trouble-shooting, I was able to finally get a non-syncing Nokia E61, syncing again with Zimbra. Here are the steps:
1. Turn phone off/on.
2. Install the root SSL certificates for the SSL certificate you are using on the Nokia.
3. Delete and re-create the Access Points.
4. Remove Mail for Exchange (M4E).
5. Turn phone off/on. (You need to do this to clear any residual M4E settings)
6. Download and re-install M4E.
7. Setup M4E Profile to connect to Zimbra.
8. Force a manual synchronisation with Zimbra.
9. M4E should now be working flawlessly again.
10. Now you can get back to your real work (ie. not trouble-shooting phones).

We've not had a problem with the phones since *touch wood*. And I hope this helps others out there who experience similiar problems.

Cheers!

Here's some useful URLs:
Installing SSL certificate on Nokia S60 3rd Edition for Exchange Activesync
http://thinkabdul.com/2006/07/24/ins...ge-activesync/

What is a root /SSL certificate (for Series 60 phones)? Also covers exporting the SSL certificates and installing on the phone
http://support.dataviz.com/support.s...=13796&pid=165

Nokia E61 Mail For Exchange - ActiveSync. Some very useful comments on this blog, which indicated the solution (good blog too).
http://www.e-series.org/archives/54

[jdell]

Anybody using the E62? As I understand it, it is a crippled version of the E61 made only for Cingular that lacks wi-fi and 3G.

This thread discusses it and the differences: http://discussion.treocentral.com/sh...d.php?t=122713

Cingular has it for $149 with 2 year contract. Also, they have a 5MB dataconnect plan for $20/month.

Any idea how much data you might use with Nokia Mail for Exchange?

Is the Zimbra sync 'chatty'? or is it pretty efficient with the amount of data passed back and forth?

Thanks!

[KevinH]

It's always good to get the latest Mail for Exchange from Nokia's website. Using the default version has lots of bugs. The E62 should work just fine it's the same OS and Mail for Exchange will work on both. I get alot of mail but filter most my maillists out of the INBOX. So say ~100 msg's per day into the INBOX and the last few month's on Cingular I've seen 20-30MB of usage. You can get a " MEdia Max 200 Bundle" plan that includes unlimited data and 200 txt msgs for $20/mo. This for me works perfect since I don't send/revc many txt messages but use heavy data. They normally don't advertise this with the smart phones or Blackberry's but if you ask for it or go online you can get it.

Mail for Exchange:
http://www.businesssoftware.nokia.co...r_exchange.php