Motorola's Good Mobile Messenging

As the name suggests, this solution from Motorola integrates the mobile users of PDAs and smartphones in your organization with Exchange Server, allowing on the move email, instant messaging and even device control

Saturday, July 05, 2008

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This application from Motorola provides complete synchronization of your Exchange folders with a PDA.

It also provides you a lot of customization options for viewing content. The application integrates with your PDA and works as if it were part of the embedded OS.

The 'Good' screen gives you a very user friendly interface and provides you with easy navigation for Good and non-Good Mobile Messaging services, contacts and notifications.

You can also get RSS feeds right in your mobile device to keep yourself updated.

GMM provides you the option of choosing feeds within the existing RSS feeds or you can add the URL if the RSS feed is not available on the list.

One GMM server is capable of handling approx 1000 users. And it requires Exchange 2007 at the backend.

Once you start the installation of GMM make sure that you have assigned proper rights to the GoodAdmin user such as 'Send As' else you can get error

Security is taken care of by FIPS certified 192-bit AES encryption for the data which is being transferred over the air and also for data which is stored on the mobile device.

Now you might be wondering that as Exchange 2007 can do all the above mentioned functions so how is this solution different?

Well! The answer lies in the kind of control it provides to the administrator over the PDA, in addition to providing synchronized messaging with the PDA.

With GMM you can create policies for mobile devices (handsets) and allocate it to users. For example, let's say you don't want your R&D team to use their phone's camera and snap pictures of your valuable IP.

Or let's say you don't want your employees to send out or copy data using Bluetooth, then you can create restricted policies for them by disabling the appropriate functionalities in the devices.

You can create such a policy for a single user or you can apply such policies to a group of users depending upon the requirement.

Not only that, but in case your device gets stolen, you can even remotely delete all the data from the device. All you need is a Net connection with the device.

This makes sure no one can access sensitive data that you have on your mobile device.

Installing it
Installing this solution on your enterprise network along with the deployed MS Exchange solution is pretty simple. You don't need to alter your existing network architecture.

GMM also makes the manageability easy for administrators; you can install, manage and upgrade the mobile device within the console.

These mean that the system administrator doesn't have to go to each person to ask for the mobile device to troubleshoot, he can do this just by sitting remotely on his desk.

You can view information such as hardware/software type and version and radio connectivity of the handheld device from the same console.

First you need to install GMM server which manages your users and the handheld mobile devices associated with that user.

Next you have to install the GMM console which provides you the front end for the GMM server.

For creating public folder on Exchange 2007, open the Exchange console and click on the 'New Public Folder Database' under the 'First Storage Group' section

The GMM console can even be installed on any other machine where GMM server is not running, only the console system should have access to the GMM server.

Another optional component that can be installed is the Good Mobile Intranet Server. It provides wireless access to the back-end server.

For evaluating this product we first created a domain on a machine with Windows Server 2003 SP2 and then deployed Exchange 2007.

Then we created a public folder on Exchange 2007; this is required to enable Good Messaging Calendar's free/busy scheduling service. Without this the GMM server would refuse to get installed.

We then installed GMM on another machine. We created a user name GoodAdmin in the ADS and then created a mailbox for the associated user. For the GoodAdmin user we granted the required rights or permissions, such as reading metadata properties, creating named properties in the information store, creating rights for receiving and sending, etc.

Once again we created a new user in the ADS, 'user1' (say) and associated mail box in Exchange 2007. Then we opened the GMM console and added the 'user1' to it.

As soon as the user is added a mail is sent across to the user, whom we have added to the GMM. The email had the necessary information that is required to install GMM client on the PDA or smart phone of the user.

Information such as where to download the GMM client from, PIN number for mobile devices with a QWERTY keyboard and a simple numeric keypad; and the procedure for installation.

Once the user gets mail, he can open the URL mentioned in the mail (from where to download the client) in the browser of his PDA or smart phone. Then he can click on the 'Download button' to download the client on to the PDA.

Then the software asks you where to download the client from. One can choose the location in his phone. But it is better to save in the storage card (if you have) so that you won't run out of the internal memory of your PDA.

This client requires around 13MB of free space in the PDA's main storage to get installed. This is a slight drawback because 13MB is a pretty huge space for a phone's primary storage.

During the installation it asks you to enter the email ID and pin number that you have received in your inbox from GoodAdmin Also it asks you to enter your mobile number.

Once the installation is complete, GMM client downloads the services that are available to you from the GMM server and then restarts your mobile device.

Now your mobile device is completely ready to work; if it has not started automatically, please restart the GMM service manually on your mobile device.

As soon as the service gets started, your mobile device synchronizes with MS Exchange for mail, calendar entries, tasks and policies.

For checking its administrative capability we went to the GMM console and opened the management window of the 'user1'.

Then in policy settings we selected 'custom policy' and then clicked on the edit policy button. We went to 'Options' tab and disabled Bluetooth, again we went to the application tab and disabled Windows media player and camera.

As soon as these policies were applied to the user, the mobile device automatically restarted.

When the mobile device booted it displayed the message showing that your Bluetooth, media player and camera are disabled.

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