iPhone 3G and Exchange/OX Sync (MAPI ?)

[psdl.mac@web.de]

Hi,

i am new in the forum, so hello to all !

My first question is about the iPhone 3G and the capability of syncing with an exchange server. Is it possible to setup OX community edition likely to sync with the new iphone.

I think OX has to fully "simulate" the Microsoft mapi protocol. Is this achieved by OX ?

Thx for all answers.

PSDL

[Martin Heiland]

Hi,

first of all we recently published a web interface made for the iPhone. Of course this is not
exactly a integration, but a remote access to your data stored at a Open-Xchange Server
via your mobile device's (iPhone 1 & 2) web browser. This already uses some capabilities
of the device like dialing numbers of a contact or viewing a map of the contacts location.

The next step will be a platform integration which naively uses the phones applications to
integrate and synchronize the data with a Open-Xchange Server. In this case you won't have
to maintain multiple sources of data but use one central point to sync them with the server.
The Microsoft Exchange MAPI protocol is not public available nor documented, it's a proprietary
standard of Microsoft. From the users point of view, the used protocol does not matter,
functionality matters. It's possible to achieve synchronization capability without using MAPI or
the proprietary BlackBerry protocol, there are many other technologies like SyncML that also
do the job and offer a similar experience than the proprietary protocols.

Right now it's possible to sync a enormous amount of phones using Funambol, just take a
look at the wiki, there's already a guide how to integrate Open-Xchange with Funambol.
According to them, the iPhone is already supported and i bet the iPhone 3G will also be
supported. Anyway, a native integration of Open-Xchange to the Apple platform is ongoing
but not finished yet.

Currently the iPhone 3G is not yet released and the only way to run native applications at
the first generation iPhone is to jailbreak it, that's not a way we want to promote.
Greetings

Resources:

http://www.open-xchange.com/iphone

http://code.google.com/p/open-xchange-mobile-web-gui/

http://www.open-xchange.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hyperion_Funambol

http://www.funambol.com/solutions/iphone.php