Reader mail is my best source of inspiration for this column. I
recently received a letter from a reader who's performing a
proof of concept for his new application provision service but
one puzzle stymies him: How do you make an email client such as
Outlook available when users aren't logged onto the network
(say, when they're on airplanes)? You could maintain the
application on your customers' laptops and let them synch with
the server when they can connect to the network, but that puts
you right back in the locally installed applications business
with an application that's only available on one device and that
you don't control.  One solution to this problem might lie in
products such as Outlook Mobile Manager, one of four products
included in Microsoft's Mobile Information Server (MIS), which
was announced last September and is in beta until sometime
during the first half of 2001. The MIS platform extends the
reach of Microsoft .NET Enterprise applications, enterprise
data, and intranet content to mobile