Ericsson Inc. unveils 'Virtual Office' software for wireless connectivity to LANs, servers

Business Wire, April 2, 1996

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 2, 1996--Ericsson Inc. has unveiled a powerful wireless middleware platform known as Virtual Office that makes it possible for users to gain access to group, corporate and public information services wirelessly, just as if they were sitting at a desktop PC connected to the LAN.

Virtual Office provides a variety of wireless electronic mail; fax; encryption and security; file transfer; and database access capabilities. The package was designed for use with a variety of wireless and wireline communications, including packet-switched Mobitex data networks; circuit-switched cellular systems such as GSM; traditional wirelines dial-up; and TCP/IP LAN/WAN connections.

Composed of both client and server software, the Virtual Office platform is based on two leading industry standard application programming interfaces (APIs) outlined in the Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Open Services Architecture (WOSA) - the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI), and the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) specification.

Both the client and server components of Virtual Office applications used standard MAPI and ODBC interfaces, eliminating the need for proprietary function calls or messages. Virtual Office wirelessly enables all MAPI- and ODBC-compliant applications, including Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Mail and Microsoft Exchange Server.

"The Virtual Office platform is a quick-and-easy way to deliver standard desktop applications to wireless users," said Henrik Hogberg, vice president and general of wireless data and paging systems, Ericsson Radio Systems. "With this technology, MAPI- and ODBC-compliant applications can be much more readily available to the mobile user."

"Our customers view wireless messaging as a way to further enable their mobile employees," said Rob Shurtleff, general manager, Microsoft Exchange Server Connectivity at Microsoft. "By tightly integrating with Microsoft Exchange Server, Ericsson's Virtual Office is helping deliver a wireless solution which will benefit the mobile workforce."

Virtual Office's client/server file transfer capability gives remote, mobile users access to all files and directories on a corporate LAN. The file transfer server software acts as an agent, logging onto the LAN server on behalf of the mobile user, and file access permission is dictated according to Windows NT password and sharename security. Optional directory list-caching and file attribute-based filtering helps improve performance and reduce airtime costs associated with using a wireless network.

Virtual Office's client software is designed for the Windows 95 operating system and can be used with Windows NT. The server components require Windows NT (version 3.51 or higher). The software is optimized for Microsoft BackOffice(TM) family (Microsoft SQL Server(TM) and Microsoft Exchange Server), but it may be used with other MAPI-and- ODBC-compliant server software.

Ericsson's 80,000 employees are active in more than 100 countries. Their combined expertise in switching, radio and networking makes Ericsson a world leader in telecommunications. -0- NOTE TO EDITORS:

Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT and BackOffice are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.

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