Being able to message groups of contacts may not be new, but Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 update, dubbed ‘Mango’, will introduce multiple collaboration features and integrate with third-party Cloud services like Facebook.
Mango will tighten integration with Microsoft’s own corporate and Cloud services like Exchange and Live.com, but will also support messaging and calendar services from Facebook with Twitter and LinkedIn to come.
Microsoft Australia’s mobile communications business director Sheau-Lan Reed said Mango will be a free update for all Windows Phone 7 users and arrive here sometime in Spring.
“There’s not such thing as a business or personal phone anymore and we want to make mobility ‘smarter and easier’ for everyone,” Reed said.
“Mango will have a ‘People Hub’ that makes it easy to set up different contact groups as you see fit.”
Reed said Mango will give people the choice as to how they receive their e-mail, including ‘rights management’ that can prevent messages from being copied or forwarded.
The new calendar integration in Mango allows multiple accounts per device and can display a corporate calendar alongside Facebook events.
Facebook uses the XMPP system for instant messaging which is supported by Mango and Reed said there is a Google app in the Marketplace, but stopped short of saying there would be a wider XMPP API available for third-party Jabber services.
For business users, Mango can access and edit SharePoint documents and upload them to SkyDrive.
Other new features include fast application switching, IE 9 with hardware graphics acceleration, and an enhanced app searching interface which can also search the Marketplace.
For business users, there is new software for password control and support for most of the Exchange policies.
Unified communications also features with native support for the Lync server and with Mango developers get access to sockets.
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