The attached figure depicts schematically the components involved in a BES+ATLAS installation and the interaction between them.
In order to synchronize e-mail, ATLAS requires communication with the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA, a.k.a. SMTP relay) using the SMTP protocol and with the IMAP server using the IMAP4 protocol and the IDLE extension. These standard protocols support all the required e-mail sync functionality, and therefore integration is quite straightforward.
In order to synchronize PIM items (calendar, contacts, notes and tasks) integration is not as clear as in the case of e-mail because there is no standard protocol widely adopted by collaboration system providers. ATLAS includes a generic interface for PIM objects access based on syncML, which can be used for instance with the Funanbol server. However, syncML is quite limited in a number of specs. Therefore the preferred way to sync PIM objects with a collaboration platform is to use an ATLAS groupware connector. These are ad-hoc connectors developed using the different APIs that the market-leading groupware manufacturers expose, which are often based on SOAP.
The features supported by each of these ad-hoc groupware connectors strongly depend, on one hand, on the features of the particular collaboration platform and, on the other hand, on the completeness of the exposed API. In essence, if a collaboration platform implements a complete set of groupware features similar to Exchange and exposes a comprehensive API, then there would be no difference between the BlackBerry user experience with Exchange and with that platform.
