In the Enterprise Desktop Edition, the corporate firewall prevents the Operations Center from connecting directly to the Exchange server. Instead, the Treo Mail service installs the Treo Mail Desktop Assistant on your PC at work. The Desktop Assistant transfers your email to and from the Microsoft Exchange email server, as well as out through the firewall to the Operations Center. If the Desktop Assistant isn't installed and running, the Operations Center can't get at your email. This means that you must always leave your work PC on if you use the Enterprise Desktop Edition and want to receive your email.

The Enterprise Desktop Edition does have one big advantage over the Internet Edition. If you read or delete a message using the Treo Mail application on your communicator, the Treo Mail service can make the corresponding changes in Microsoft Exchange, saving you the confusion and hassles of having to make the same changes in two places.

Installing and using Treo Mail
Treo Mail isn't hard to install, but you must follow the directions exactly. The Treo Mail service needs to know certain things about the email server it will connect to, and if you don't enter that information correctly, the service won't be able to deliver your email to your Treo. I tried to enter this information from memory and needed help from the Handspring technical support staff to get the mess sorted out, so make sure you have the information correct before you start installing Treo Mail.

I suggest that you make note of the exact name of the incoming email server that the service will connect to, as well as the logon name and password. You can usually find this information on your ISP's support pages, or get it from your network administrator if you're using the Corporate Desktop Edition.

Ever since I got Treo Mail installed properly, it has worked perfectly. My communicator automatically checks for messages using the interval I specified and sounds a nice jazz tune to alert me when new messages arrive. It even shows how many new ones there are.

I concluded that I don't really need to know the instant a new message arrives in my Inbox, so I haven't been using the SMS alerts. However, turning SMS alerts on or off takes only a few seconds, and it's nice to know that the feature is there for those times when I'm expecting a really urgent message but can't be by my PC waiting for it.

Choosing how frequently the Treo Mail Assistant should check for messages takes a bit of thought. If you don't often get urgent messages and you want to conserve airtime minutes, you can set the Assistant to manual mode. If you really need to stay on top of your messages, you can have the Assistant check for messages as frequently as every 30 minutes and set up SMS alerts too.

I normally have the Treo Mail Assistant set to automatically check for messages every two hours during business hours. This is a nice compromise, allowing me to receive my messages fairly frequently throughout the day, without burning up all the airtime minutes on my mobile phone plan. But when I'm expecting an important message, I have it check every 30 minutes. It takes only seconds to make this change, making it simple to adapt the Assistant's behavior to my needs.