Now, Microsoft appears to be setting its sights on Research in Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry, with the goal of rendering mobile middleware obsolete, the article says.

eWEEK.com's Carmen Noble writes:

Microsoft is readying updates to both its Exchange groupware and Windows Mobile smartphone operating system that will let an Exchange server push corporate email data to Windows Mobile devices without the type of middleware that RIM requires. "Our argument has been to use the existing infrastructure for all mobile devices," said John Starkweather, group product manager for mobile and embedded devices at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash. "We think that [BlackBerry Enterprise Server] and other middleware are temporary stopgap solutions."

The Windows Mobile Treo and the BlackBerry may be similar from a form-factor and QWERTY keyboard perspective, but the Windows Mobile Treo has a big advantage in that it can connect to an Exchange server without middleware, Noble notes.

RIM officials, meanwhile, insist that security is the strong selling point of their approach:

"We were able to do it without middleware too, [but] we realized that without the security software, nobody would install it," said Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO of RIM, in Waterloo, Ontario. "You don't have to open firewalls to [get corporate data pushed to a BlackBerry device]."

Read the full eWEEK.com story here...

Windows Treo Threatens RIM Middleware

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