AstraSync First Thoughts – Synching via Activesync Almost Here!

Astrasync is trying to position itself as the middle ground between BIS and BES. We have mentioned it before because we find the idea very interesting. Currently BlackBerry users have the choice Between email only BIS and expensive BES. They also always had the 3rd option of buggy SyncML which never worked for anybody. AstraSync is hoping to create a perfect middle ground by offering email, contacts, and calendar pushed to your device without BES. All for only ~$49 a year!

AstraSync from Mailsite is almost here; this application is truly the next evolutionary step in Blackberry sync technology via ActiveSync. What AstraSync does is basically handle your connection via MS Exchange 2007 or Mailsite’s Fusion server client to allow you to sync natively with your blackberry calendar, contacts, and email via Direct Push technology.

I’ve been beta testing this application for the last few weeks and my experience has been wonderful, actually liberating, its great to have my Outlook 2007 contacts, calendar, and email all synced to my Blackberry without a hiccup. Gone are the days of buggy SyncML clients often times duplicating or triplicating your PIM databases and putting your whole world upside down for a few hours (and I know some of you out there know exactly what I mean ).

With AstraSync everything is easy; put in your basic information eg. server, username, password, domain and that’s all, hit sync and your up and going and the rest is handled behind the scenes.  Astrasync will sync instantly as soon as a change is made in Outlook 2007 or Exchange 2007(Exchange 2003 is not supported at this time but MailSite is making every effort to support it in a future release).

Its blazing fast, I literally added a calendar event on my Blackberry 8310 and withing 10 seconds my Outlook 2007 Calendar was updated as well as my Exchange 2007 Calendar. I imported about 350 contacts in a few minutes 3-4 minutes tops. Now Blackberry users don’t need to have a BES account or even a BIS account to be able to sync to Exchange.

AstraSync will truly amaze when its released in the next upcoming weeks around August, the launch was suppose to come in July but Beta testing is still going on to refine some minor details. As you may understand the ramifications of this upcoming release are enormous and Mailsite wants to make sure everything is great. I want to give a special thanks to Dave Ryder and AmitPatel  for being so helpful with all my basic questions and support issues.

My setup: I can personally attest to the user experience with Exchangemymail. This company’s service is outstanding with a capital “O”. Their support is in the premiere category if such a category exists, I also want to thank Antonio Oviedo for his outstanding support service with my Exchange 2007 account and making sure everything was working flawlessly.

So folks, keep your RSS readers updated because AstraSync from Mailsite is coming soon.

Here are some screenshots: