Enterprise Tools Are Migrating To The Mobile Market Palms. Treos. iPAQs. And let’s not forget the BlackBerry, that little gadget that’s sweet as sugar to roving executives.
All told, handhelds of every shape, size, and flavor have entered the enterprise, often in force, and supporting them is now a standard part of the IT expert’s day. But do they truly add to office efficiency?
By definition, PDAs and handhelds are good for personal data—the contacts, emails, and calendars that most of us rely on to get things done. But with the right software, they can be used for enterprise apps as well, the kind of high-end, large-scale software that sales teams, warehouse staff, and more and more mobile users are starting to clamor for.Here’s a look at some of the best mobile apps on the market, including apps for Web browsing, file sharing, network management, CRM, and more.
GoodAccess
If you’re like most IT managers, you’ve spent a good deal of time and money on custom software, such as CRM, ERP, and other database systems, all of it meant to keep your workforce humming. Some of those apps run on remote notebooks with VPNs. But very few run on PDAs, until now.
GoodAccess lets you connect mobile workers to enterprise software behind a firewall. How? It relies largely on a secure AES transport layer, which means that roving users can tap into Oracle, Siebel, and other high-end software from a range of handhelds, including Palms and Pocket PCs.
The software even has a number of sought-after features to please end users and IT staff. Among these is offline use. (Users can save data to their PDAs to read and edit when they’re not connected to your network.) The software can also multitask, letting users respond to email or fiddle with Pocket Word while their CRM app crunches data. And a fairly advanced push feature lets you transfer urgent data, such as sales reports, new leads, or trouble tickets, to your mobile workers from a single, centralized location. GoodAccess also ties in with bar code scanners to read part and inventory numbers, a must for employees who roam a warehouse, scanning boxes.
GoodLink
Trends come and go, but email is (and will most likely remain) the Internet’s killer app. That’s where GoodLink Enterprise Edition 4.5, a GoodAccess companion piece, comes in. It lets mobile workers tap in to Exchange, so they can stop using the simple POP accounts most PDAs support. It also has a host of security features and claims to have the lowest TCO of any enterprise wireless messaging system, as well as seven of the Fortune 10 and roughly half of the Fortune 100 among its users.
For Pocket PCs and Palms, GoodLink boasts an array of impressive security perks, such as remote, policy-based control of handheld passwords and remote-controlled data erasure on any device. Its interface apes Microsoft Outlook—a boon for most users familiar with it already—and comes in English, Italian, German, Spanish, and French versions, for those of us who roam across borders and time zones.
Perhaps most impressive is the optional GoodLink Compliance Manager. It lets admins and IT managers build and enforce tough security policies on users’ handhelds. For instance, you can stipulate that an antivirus package of your choice is running and fully updated before GoodLink can be installed, or even while a user is tapping out email.
2CRM
In the early days of handhelds, warehouse and medical apps drove PDA adoption. But times have changed. Today it’s roving sales apps that have IT managers scrambling to give their users handhelds.
Enter Air2Web’s 2CRM, a suite that gives an enterprise sales force access to data from existing Sales Force Automation, Field Force Automation, and call center systems. It lets you open Siebel, Sales-Force.com, and other software to field users, whether they’re using a Palm, RIM (BlackBerry), or Windows CE device. Even better, it’s driven by xHTML and forms, so it can deliver and even update remote applications with ease because the XML API lets you grab data from existing apps with little fuss. And even if your users pay Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, or one of a dozen other networks to give them access, don’t worry: 2CRM, like other high-end tools in this list, can be used independently of the network vendor.
Blazer
Pocket PCs come equipped with Pocket IE, and for most users it’s more than enough to surf the Web, make bookmarks, and read the news on the run. But Palm-based browsers have rarely matched IE’s feature set and ease of use—that is, until Blazer arrived.
Palm’s Blazer is perhaps the leading browser for the Palm market, as any product that supports HTML, xHTML, cHTML, WML, SSL, JavaScript, CSS, and most graphics formats (even PNG) should be. Like Pocket IE, it can tweak the layout of a Web page to minimize scrolling, shifting the graphics and text around to make them fit your screen. (But like IE’s similar feature, this one often leads to odd results.)
Blazer also has all the standard browser features you’d expect, such as Back, Forward, Home, and Refresh buttons, as well as a solid bookmarks function and a History list. But it’s the horizontal view feature that makes most users smile: With it, you can rotate a Web page 90 degrees for optimal viewing, a feature that was missing in IE until the most recent versions of Windows Mobile.
Blazer also has a decent search feature and a way to let users navigate a page with only one hand, selecting radio buttons, pull-down menus, and checkboxes without a stylus. An offline browsing feature will please users without Web access, but admins and IT directors will find more value in the SSL encryption and other security features that make Blazer a real option for corporate Web surfing.
Migo
If you’re a handheld addict and wish you could transfer your desktop to your Palm or Pocket PC, you’ll like Migo. It lets you quickly sync your handheld and desktop machines.
In fact, Migo can be used on more than Palms, Pocket PCs, and BlackBerrys. It runs on nearly any mobile storage device, such as a USB drive, smartcard, and even an MP3 player, iPod, or PlayStation Portable.
Migo relies on a user profile, in which you choose the documents you want to synchronize between your handheld and desktop machines. You can choose recent documents (within the last month), older documents, or even all your documents, provided you have the storage to do so. Migo will also synchronize your email settings, including user accounts and passwords, for convenience. It can be a boon for help desk agents who hate to configure handheld email.
Infrastructure Command and Control
Thanks to remote management tools, networks no longer need to be run onsite. In theory, a data center director can test router settings from a laptop in Bali, even if his data center and the rest of his luckless colleagues find themselves in Detroit in midwinter. But only a few apps will let you control your network from a handheld, and Ecutel’s Infrastructure Command and Control, or IC2, is on the short list.
IC2 lets you configure, tweak, and talk with servers, workstations, storage systems, and appliances from a handheld device. You’ll need to install the IC2 server behind your firewall to do so. (As you can guess, it’s the server that talks to your infrastructure; the client software on your handheld merely instructs the server.) But an admin with IC2 on his Palm or PocketPC can run most of the network transactions he needs to, as IC2 supports any Windows or Unix server, router, firewall, printer, UPS, or appliance that can run WMI, SNMP, Telnet, or SSH. It also boasts an audit feature and runs on Pocket PCs, Palms, smartphones, and BlackBerrys.
The end result? Your users won’t be the only ones who can work on the go, and you’ll be a step closer to that beach in Bali—or wherever your travels take you
