March/April 2005

It should be easier in future for mobile phone developers using the Symbian operating system to provide their customers with the ability to synchronise with email, calendar and contact details handled by Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.

This is the outcome of a licensing agreement announced by Microsoft and Symbian, allowing Symbian to use Microsoft's Exchange Server ActiveSync protocol.

Symbian will now make the ActiveSync protocol plug-in available to all Symbian OS licensees. Providing they then set up a separate standard distribution agreement with Microsoft, they can implement the direct synchronisation capabilities.

Although Microsoft and Symbian are rivals in the mobile phone OS market, the agreement clearly has benefits for both sides, since Microsoft provides one of the de facto standards in email handling, while Symbian is so far the dominant mobile OS developer.