[Windows Phone 7 General] Spike15:
It's not about theft, it's just about data loss.

For example, all the data on my phone that I care about, is in my Exchange that sits in my closet along with the rest of my home servers. If my phone is stolen, I just resync with Exchange and all my e-mails, calendar entries, and contacts are back.

I manage my own Exchange backups as well, so I can be assured, due to my own vigilance over which I have control that when/if I supper data loss (because of a drive failure et cetera) I will have minimized my data loss.

Not so with the cloud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_data_loss_2009

That really depends what kind of software you're writing.

I work in the IT department of a goverment organization, and there really are some things that a web GUI is just better for.

You don't need an MMC or other client-side application to manage a piece of network hardware, for example, and software that's designed to be easily-accessible or that's designed to work mostly with server-side data anyway (especially in a simple manner) is definitely more suited to the web.

Then you have software that's definitely more suited to the desktop category, and this is where I have a problem, is because people are take things that shouldn't be in the former category, and sticking it there, and just artificially depleting the latter category.

Besides which, server-side programs in an organization are different than server-side programs to the prosumer. There's a big difference to my Exchange (which is a server-side program) which I manage myself, and storing data in "the cloud" which I don't manage, and where my data's safety is constantly called into question because I have no oversight.

In an organization, running a program on their servers, they have that oversight. They can assure themselves of the integrity and security of their data, and therefore it's a different case than "the cloud", because in "the cloud" you have no idea who's looking at your data, you can't be assured 100% of its security, and you can't be assured 100% of its integrity, and if there happens to be data loss (even if a backup exists), you don't have any control over the timeline under which it will be restored.

No, you're mistaken.

You see, Exchange is extremely scalable...that's why it's one of (if not the) the most popular enterprise-grade groupware solutions in the world.

ActiveSync, however, is not, because it can't be easily deployed (BES has a very easy Enterprise Activation scheme, if you've ever used it, you merely have to activate the user in BES and the user -- with very little outside assistance -- can activate his or her BlackBerry) and it can't be easily maintained (if you change your AD password you have to change your ActiveSync password, for example).

As for your assertion that Exchange is firewall-friendly and BES is not...that's ridiculous.

In order for ActiveSync to work, you actually have to configure publishing rules on your firewall, publishing port 443 through to Exchange.

With BES, you have to do no such thing...you merely have to make sure that the BES server can talk to the outside world, and you're done.

Now, don't get me wrong, I definitely prefer the Exchange paradigm -- having full control over your own publishing, rather than relying on RIM -- but to say that it [Exchange] is more firewall-friendly is quite frankly wrong.