All the essential components required to implement WhiteBerry now exist. As discussed in Section 4.1, all the technological components (devices, modems, networks) are well established and readily available.
The necessary open protocols are also ready and available: the LEAP protocols are complete and have been published as Internet RFCs, and open support organizations for their continued revision and enhancement are up and running at LeapForum.org, ESRO.org and EMSD.org.
In addition, an initial framework for the development of WhiteBerry solutions has been established. This framework consists of:
Each component of this development framework is described in the following sections.
Open-source software implementations of the LEAP protocols are available for all major device and Message Center platforms.
Reference Protocol Engines have been implemented in the form of portable code, which has been ported to a wide variety of platforms and end user devices. On the device side, software has been implemented for pagers and cell phones; for palm size devices (Windows CE, Palm PC, Palm OS, EPOC); for Windows 2000, Windows 98/95, and Windows NT; and for Pine (UNIX, Windows, DOS). On the Message Center side, software is available for Windows NT, Solaris, and Linux.
All of this software is being made publicly available through the MailMeAnywhere open-source software distribution center, in the form of free software, subject to the General Public License (GPL) [14]. For complete details visit the MailMeAnywhere website at http://www.MailMeAnywhere.org.
The protocol engines provide the basic message submission and delivery capability for the mobile environment. But this capability must be augmented with a variety of other tools and capabilities in order to bring a complete, well-integrated solution to the end user.
Among other things, the user must be provided with flexible tools for selecting which e-mail messages are forwarded to the mobile device, and which can remain in his fixed mailbox for later review. The end user solution must also include facilities to ensure proper synchronization and continuity between the mobile account and the fixed account.
In addition, there is a need to provide Mobile Messaging solutions in a variety of contexts. A mobile user may have a fixed e-mail account in any of various shapes and sizes, such as a corporate account or an ISP-based account, and he may wish to control and administer his mobile capability in various ways, such as via his desktop mail application, or via his corporate or ISP-based mail server.
In order to accomplish this large heterogeneity of Mobile Messaging implementation, the integration and development community requires a variety of tools for accessing and processing the user's fixed mailboxes. In particular, comprehensive and close integration of the LEAP protocol engines will be required with mail routers, mail retrievers, mailbox synchronizers, inbox filters and rule- and directory-based fowarders.
For this purpose, MailMeAnywhere includes an open public forum for the development and distribution of the necessary tools and capabilities. The MailMeAnywhere development forum is a public framework for the collective development and enhancement of LEAP integration tools on a continuous, on-going basis.
This open development model, based on open protocols and open-source software, ensures the availability of a rich and expanding suite of tools and accessories for integration of the WhiteBerry solution in various configurations and across multiple platforms.
This open, heterogeneous development model is in sharp contrast to BlackBerry's narrow focus on Microsoft Outlook and Exchange.
The open WhiteBerry paradigm must address a classical bootstrapping problem: a useful WhiteBerry solution requires implementation of the LEAP protocols in both devices and Message Centers, each of which cannot function without the other.
Therefore a framework element has also been established to assist in overcoming this problem: an initial set of LEAP-based Subscriber Services have been put in place to provide support for early deployment of the protocols in end user devices. These initial Subscriber Services are of limited scale and capability; however they are more than sufficient to play this initial support role, and to demonstrate the viability of the WhiteBerry solution.
These Subscriber Services are entirely free, and are available at
ByName.net, ByNumber.net, and My.ByName.net. For complete details
visit these websites at
http://www.ByName.net,
http://www.ByNumber.net, and
http://My.ByName.net.
As a starting point for further implementations, we have also established an initial WhiteBerry implementation. This implementation is freely available as a development tool to anyone who would like to examine it, enhance it, or use it as the basis for additional implementations. For complete details, see the announcement entitled:
Announcing Free Availability of
Neda Communication Inc.'s
Enhanced Two-Way Paging (ETWP) Products and Services
For WindowsCE Hand-Held PCs
over CDPD and Wireless IP
Neda-ETWP-wce-gold-1.2
June 12, 1998
This announcement is available at
http://www.neda.com/products/Neda-ETWP/gold-1.2/wce/announce/announce.html
[15].
This announcement provides a complete step-by-step description of how to build a WhiteBerry solution using existing and available off-the-shelf components and services. As a concrete case-study example, we present the experiences of a particular user - we'll call her Lisa Simpson. The steps Lisa followed and the choices she made in assembling her WhiteBerry system are summarized in Table 2. The numbered steps in this table correspond to the generic steps described in Section 4.5 and Figure 3.
At the end of this process Lisa had her very own, fully functional, true Mobile Messaging solution - and you can, too.
This base implementation, of course, is not the same thing as a comprehensive, market-ready messaging solution. However, it clearly demonstrates the viability of WhiteBerry as a complete, end-to-end messaging solution. And the existence of this base implementation means that WhiteBerry is not just an idea - it is an actual working system, which is up and running today.