On their blog the Microsoft Exchange Team have a very insightful look of the process of building the new Direct Push technology in the upcoming Exchange 2003 SP2. It is a very technical read but what else do you expect from developers. Here’s an excerpt:
Around this time, we had begun looking into what it would take to offer an up-to-date mobile email solution (”AUTD,” from here on) that competed with the likes of RIM, Good, et al. I liked the up-to-date nature of their solutions but had not personally adopted them for reasons of device choice (again with the form factor), setup costs (in terms of money, deployment overhead, and operational overhead), or both. Being on the Exchange team, we’ve always got two sets of customers: the administrative staff and end users, and we wanted to build a solution that worked well for both. By enumerating our requirements and constraints, we essentially painted ourselves into a corner (happily, this corner contained the solution):
