Windows=based smartphones work best with Exchange.

Let’s face it, your users are going to want to connect  to your organization’s Exchange services with their mobile phones. Rather than allow that activity to grow willy nilly, you may want to impose some controls on the process. So it might make sense to know what smartphones play nicely with Exchange.

Smartphone makers have been steadily improving their handsets’ Exchange capabilities. What’s more, Microsoft has also moved, with the release of Exchange 2010, to better accommodate phone warriors. For example, with Exchange 2010 and ActiveSync, members of your organization get real-time access to their communications on literally hundreds of devices. Email, contacts and calendar items can be automatically synchronized over the air quickly.

What’s more, a user’s inbox becomes truly universal. Barriers to all forms of communication–email, voicemail, rights-protected messages, calendar requests, RSS feeds and saved instant messages–have been removed allowing one-stop access for members of your organization.

In addition, versatility and productivity of mobile email has been boosted with features like previewing messages with speech-to-text voicemail and creating a contest for messages with a conversation view.

Microsoft didn’t leave administrators out of the equation either. They have greater control over device access. They can create lists of devices to block, quarantine or permit access to their network. And budget-strapped IT departments will be glad to hear that the additional mobile support is included at no additional cost in Exchange 2010. Some of that cost, no doubt, is unloaded on smartphone makers, who have to pay a licensing fee to use ActiveSync.

If your users are interested in ho-hum tasks–synchronizing email, contacts and calendars between a phone and a computer–then most phones will fit the bill. Of course, users are never content with ho-hum, are they? They want to search all their messages on your organization’s mail server, look up addresses in the server address list, make appointments that are for their eyes only and reply to meeting requests sent from other people’s phones. For those tasks, a phone’s capabilities can vary.

Understandably, phones based on Microsoft’s Windows mobile operating system play best with Exchange. They have the most complete feature set and they are the most faithful in look and feel to Outlook on the desktop. The downside to these phones, though, is they lack pizzazz.

Worse yet, the operating system is clumsy. Although Microsoft has made some improvements in the OS in recent months, it still has a desktop feel. It has too many nested menus. Nested menus get more and more irksome as screen sizes shrink. Even Microsoft’s own employees have been tepid toward the phones, so much so that Microsoft started offering them free Windows mobiles last month.

In addition, selection is more limited for Windows mobile phones than other hotter models.

Next to a Windows-based phone, Research In Motion’s Blackberry line is the most compatible with Exchange. At its inception, the Blackberry was designed for business users. Since many business users work with Exchange, the RIM folks have worked diligently to make their hardware work effectively with Microsoft’s software. The back end of the Blackberry network also supports a version of Exchange 2010′s Direct Push feature. Direct Push allows email to be “pushed” to a user’s phone at scheduled times. What’s nice about the Blackberry is that there’s a wide selection of models and the platform is supported by all four of the major wireless carriers in the United States.

Certainly the smartphone with the most cachet in the market is Apple’s iPhone. It does have some drawbacks, though. It can’t create private appointments, for instance, nor can it synchronize tasks from the hardware itself. What’s worse, it’s only offered by a single carrier, AT&T, and one that’s been maligned for its service quality and coverage. However, because of the iPhone’s ability to expand its capabilities through downloadable applications, some Exchange issues can be resolved. For example, RERLSoft makes a suite of apps for performing tasks such as over-the-air access to Outlook tasks, notes and contacts, as well as Exchange notes and tasks.

The smartphones that are least compatible with Exchange out of the box are those based on Google’s Android operating system. That deficiency, though, doesn’t seem to have hurt the phone’s popularity among enterprise users. That’s not to say that you can’t get an Android phone that plays nice with Exchange. Verizon’s Droid Incredible has ActiveSync built into it. In addition, as with the iPhone, Exchange capabilities can be added to the phones through apps like TouchDown Exchange. However, you need to make sure that your phone carrier supports the downloading of apps from Google’s Android App Marketplace. AT&T, for example, doesn’t support downloads from the marketplace, but it does have its own Android apps store.