Pintmaster

Funambol – The Open Source Push Email server

Like many on-the-go businesspeople, I am addicted to my blackberry. I wouldnt say im addicted to the blackberry, as much as I am addicted to push email on my mobile phone.

I am in the unique situation where I have an influential decision in what technology the rest of my office use for this task also, and we recently purchased Blackberry Enterprise Server for the office. We did this about 6 months before Microsoft released their Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2003, which among other things added a free push-email implementation. In order to use this, you need to have a phone running Windows Mobile 5.0 as its operating system. At this stage there are only a couple on that market with this technology so it will be a little time before this is more widely adopted.

At the same time as Microsoft is rolling out their free Push-email, RIM, the maker of the blackberry devices is fighting a legal battle. This is distracting RIM from competing in the market place that they dominate and giving M$ an advantage. It is predicted that by the end of the year, Microsoft will replace RIM as the number one player. That's not such a bad thing. Microsoft's software is free per user, whereas RIM is charging $1499.99 for their Small business edition with 5 licenses and $2999.99 for the Enterprise level with 1 license. The only difference between the two is the cost of each additional license.

So, it looks that without drastic changes, RIM is on the way out. Microsoft is going to change the model for push email and bundle it as a standard for their email server. They will seek to make money licensing their Windows Mobile 5.0 OS to cell phone makers.

Exit Blackberry, Enter Funambol

At the time we were purchasing Blackberry Enterprise Server, I was also looking at open source alternatives. I couldnt find any. Today, I learned about Funambol. Funambol is an open source alternative Push Email server, that appears to be able to connect to anything and everything under the sun. It can use exchange, MAPI, pop3 as its data source, and push the email to Blackberry, Windows Mobile 5.0 as well as SyncML enabled phones (which is apparently a bunch of em). It's free to use at the moment and is still in beta. It is anticipated that the paid version will be more feature rich when it comes out, but the free version will still be functional.

This is a great step forward and I am curious to know how people are finding Funambol. Does it work? How well? How does it compare to Blackberry Enterprise Server / Exchange 2003 w/ Push