Goodlink now works with Nokia E71
UPDATE: 2 March 2009 – Visto Acquires Good
Message to Visto folks – I know your product set well but the Good mobile messaging product is sensational. Please promise to keep innovating the Good suite – it is the closest thing to mobile mail nirvana I have ever seen. When I could not get Good for my E71, I had to turn to Visto – there is no comparison so please keep investing in the Good product and team.
UPDATE: 10 December 2008
Good Mobile Messaging has announced that the Nokia E71 is now compatible with Good Mobile messaging. I now have Good working on my E71 in London via Fasthosts hosted exchange.
Some quick tips for you to get the best experience and ensure a smooth ride.
- Make sure your IT Manager/Admin or hosted exchange provider has upgraded their Good server to the latest version. Your GMM server needs to be running Good 5.0 SR1 (Exchange Server 5.0.3.19 Domino Server 5.0.3.18) or Good 5.0 SR2 (Exchange Server 5.0.4.28 Domino Server 5.0.4.27)
- Ask your IT Manager/Admin or hosted exchange provider to make available GMM 5.1.0.37 (the latest version) for your handset to download via the OTA site at http://get.good.com (access this from your handset)
- One trap for users – once installed and running for a while, the new version may ask for a lock code – the default is 12345. See the release notes on this. There seems to be a small issue here and hopefully the GMM product team can remove the issue where GMM automatically locks the phone after just 20 minutes and the user cannot increase this phone lock timeout
Once downloaded and installed, GMM magically starts to work on the E71!
I will post a longer review of the experience of GMM on the E71 after a few more days of use, but I still maintain that Good Mobile Messaging on an E71 is the ultimate mobile email experience – full stop. Forget Blackberry – Good rocks!
See the official announcement about Good on the E71 at the Be Good portal.
Blogging works! Thanks to the 7000+ readers of this post we convinced Motorola Good to ensure the E71 is supported, and thanks to the team at Good – especially Rona Orenstein and Kitt Gilbert Scott who also took up the case with Fasthosts here in the UK to get them to upgrade their server to support this new release.
UPDATE: November 29 2008
I thought it would be worth an update on this post, as it receives a fair number of hits every day so many others must also be hanging out for the E71 + Goodlink fix.
I’ve been testing version 5.1.0.24 on my E71 and E61i. The good news is that it works on both devices! The keyboard issue with the E71 and version 4.9.3.34 has been fixed, and with version 5 there are some nice new features.
The bad news is that it’s not quite there yet (5.1 is still in Beta). I managed to get GMM 5.1.0.24 downloaded OTA when I went to get.good.com and entered my Fasthosts email credentials, and everything was going fine but I noticed that not all of my 7,200 outlook contacts had been downloaded.
According to the super support team at Motorola Good, I have the “power-user performance issue” – lucky me, but this will be fixed in the final release.
When I ran the new 5.1 client on the E71 on a Goodlink test account (with only 1 contact), it worked perfectly.
I can’t wait for the final release, and to have my E71 humming along with GMM 5 – it is worth the wait.
October update: Blogging works! After reading the post below about how Fasthosts were the ones in the slow lane, I hear that after Fasthosts read my post below, they decided to act – fantastic.
Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long to upgrade their Good server in the UK so I can trial the new GMM symbian version 5.1 beta that is currently being tested by a group of GMM users.
As per the many comments below, Jerry Tian has developed a workaround for the E71 (basically he has modified Antony Paranata’s excellent screenshot program to provide the keyboard mapping that the E71 is lacking when used with Goodlink) which is described in more detail on the Good forum.
Thanks to Jerry signing his version with my IMEI, I have now started using Goodlink with the E71. The fix gives you about 80% of the functionality I had with GMM for the E61i, but this is enough to keep me mobile – thanks Jerry! Let’s hope that the GMM 5.0 beta to be released soon brings full goodlink functionality back to the E71.
LATEST UPDATE FROM GOOD: Beta fix due September, official release of Good 5 for Symbian in December. Info direct from the Be Good portal.
All,
There have been several questions on the possibility of GMM support on Nokia E71 recently.
I wanted to send out a quick update to let you know that Good Mobile Messaging will be supported on the Nokia E71 as part of the next Good Symbian release.
There are several engineering challenges with this device because some critical integration modules we need for our application to function are not available on the E71. We now have a plan to work around those.
The official release date is December 2008. We will have a limited Beta program starting in the last week of September.
If you are a customer interested in joining the Beta program please contact your sales engineer or technical support person.
Regards,
Reena Nadkarni | Group Product Manager | Motorola Good Technology Group
So…it is not long now. Thanks to all the London Calling readers for contributing here and also on the good portal – it seems to have had the desired effect.
From what I know of Good version 5, it has some great new features – so when available on Symbian, the Nokia Good experience will be exceptional.
I’ve been invited to join the beta program for Good Symbian so if I am able, I will report my experiences shortly. Thanks again to the London Calling readers for raising this as an important issue, and proving there are thousands of Good users out there who want to deploy the solution on the new Nokia E71.
UPDATE 1: Since the original post on July 4th, I have had almost 1000 2200 views and multiple emails on the subject. It looks like the new Nokia E71 users craving for their Goodlink mobile email fix are being held back by a bug where Goodlink does not recognise the Nokia E71 keyboard properly – which makes it a bit hard to send email! Good claim a fix is on the way – but let’s hope for all the Nokia E71 Goodlink users that this fix is accelerated and released ASAP.
UPDATE 2: I posted an entry on the Good forum, and received a response from Dan Rudolph, Director of Marketing for Motorola Good Technology Group – his response from the forum is quoted verbatim below:
“Hi Andrew – Good supports the Nokia E61/62 series, but we have never supported the E71. We are looking at adding the E71 and will let you know if we are able to support it. BTW, for everyone out there, you can lookup the devices Good supports in the “supported devices” area after you log into the Good Online Portal at www.good.com/gmp. Or, you can look up basic device support info on the Good web site at http://www.good.com/corp/int_supported_dvcs.php“
UPDATE 3: Hats off to Rena from Good, she has posted a comment below about this issue – paraphrased below. It sounds like Good are listening to this discussion – let’s hope they have a fix soon.
“Initial assessment is that it will require more than a keyboard fix. We hope to find a solution that will ensure that the optimal Good user experience is maintained as much as possible on the E71 as well. I will post an update on the ETA as soon as I have it.”
Regards, Reena Nadkarni, Group Product Manager, Motorola Good Technology Group
UPDATE 4: I now have a Nokia E71 – see my first impressions in a new post. While the goodlink keyboard issue on the E71 is annoying, I have managed a workaround. I am still using Goodlink for email notification. I am lucky that my web host allows both Goodlink and direct push (enabled in exchange 2003 SP2 and exchange 2007).
I am using Nokia Mail for Exchange (MfE) for sending email as well as syncing contacts and calendar. Not a pretty solution but it does work for now. Good on the E71 does not have the contact API hooks so the Good contacts are stand alone and are not presented during calls/SMS etc so you need to have the contacts synced via MfE. If your host or system admin allows both Good and MfE then you can also use this workaround.
Some of the normal shortcut keys do work normally in Good so I can still move mail around from subfolders to the inbox to have them appear in MfE. Hopefully there will be a fix soon because The Nokia E71 + Good mobile messaging will make the E71 a complete business tool to rival anything Blackberry comes up with – even the Blackberry Bold.
The good forum on this topic is now alive with posts from many companies who have a large installed base of Goodlink users wanting to upgrade to the E71 – head over to https://www.good.com/begood/message/1816 to add your voice to the discussion and help Good fast track a fix to the E71 goodlink issue.
The rest of the original post is below.
For those following London Calling (thankyou to those 165 230 RSS feed readers and 100’s of casual visitors every day), you will know that I have been hinting ever so slightly about wanting a new Nokia E71.
Ahead of upgrading my E61i to the E71, one of my key considerations is will Good Mobile Messaging (Goodlink) work on the E71 as there has been a lot of discussion on the Nokia forums about how Goodlink does not work properly on Symbian 60 3rd edition handsets that run feature pack 1 such as the E65, and N95.
In particular, when setting up Goodlink, you need to enter a PIN number, and apparently on these phones, it is nearly impossible to do so. The forums even suggest having to use a bluetooth keyboard to get started.
As an aside, I think Goodlink is simply the world’s best email client. When coupled with an exchange server, it simply provides the best push email experience, with features such as subfolders, intelligent push, as well as being able to search messages, and see calendar items, contacts, tasks and notes from your server on the mobile – simply brilliant! I would say that of all the push email clients available, nothing touches Good.
[Please note, I do not work for Good or Motorola – I’m simply a user of the goodlink service via my web host who provides me with managed exchange and happy to say I am very pleased with it and have used it for nearly 3 years.]Having to entertain the loss of my Goodlink functionality on a new E71 is a showstopper, so ahead of investing £329, I wanted to see for myself if the service would work on an E71.
What better way than to head down to the London Nokia Experience Store on Regent Street at lunch time to play with an E71 (not a plastic dummy, but the real thing).
If you’ve ever asked to look at a real handset in a typical mobile store, you will know the looks you get, or the excuses (we don’t have one out of the box on display) etc etc
Imagine my delight when I located the E71 stand in the Nokia store, and I was able to play with the handset and even download software to try out on it via their wireless connection. Within seconds of sitting down, a helpful assistant came over and started talking about the new handset and it’s features (I’m already sold – I don’t need the sales pitch, – but he was helpful and not “selling” it to me).
I explained my issue, I wanted to see if the goodlink client would work on the handset as I have it on my E61i and it is vital I can transfer it to the E71. About that time the Store Manager (didn’t get his name) walked past and heard my question.
“Why don’t you try installing it on mine” he said – and handed me his personal E71 and allowed me to put my SIM into it and test it! How about that for customer service. I asked him about the price of the handset – listed in store for £329, but I just checked Expansys, and they are still advertising them at £369.95 – that’s nearly a £41 saving in-store. He said that as they get 8,000 people a week in the store, they aren’t tied to sales targets per se- it’s all about the experience. His willingness to hand me his phone to play with proved this point.
He had to go off, so left me with another assistant, who asked me more about Goodlink and what I thought of it (he had not heard of it – it is one of the best kept secrets). I showed him the client on my E61i and explained the excellent user experience and functionality available from Good.
I showed him the contacts function by typing in Nokia, and up popped a screen full of Nokia contacts. “Do you work at Nokia?” he asked – amazed I knew so many in the industry (perhaps he thought I was a mystery shopper from Head Office sent to ask hard questions!).
This friendly person left, to be replaced by Kasim (I know his name as we swapped cards). He is a Product Specialist and vowed to do more research into the Goodlink E71 issue and see what he could do to help. I agreed to keep in touch via email to collaborate.
Bottom line: The Nokia flagship stores are all about the experience. No pushy sales people, and they allow you to actually play with the phones!
Footnote: The excellent technical sales team at Good in the UK have also been in touch and tell me that they are working on it and will “have a fix in the next release of the Nokia client”. This can’t come soon enough for me.
In all, a very good experience (pun intended) all round and I will definitely go back to the Nokia flagship store to purchase my E71 (unless my strong hints have been enough – in that case someone from Nokia PR should get in touch with me), as I am the E71’s biggest fan – and Goodlink on an E71 is mobile heaven.
About Andrew
Based in London, The Actionable Futurist and former Global Managing Partner at IBM, Andrew Grill is a popular and sought-after presenter and comementator on issues around digital disruption, workplace of the future and new technologies such as blockchain. Andrew is a multiple TEDx and International Keynote Speaker.