Choosing the Right Mobile Platform

There are so many smartphones available in the market that it becomes
difficult to choose the right one for your business needs. Some might believe
that BlackBerry owns the enterprise space for mobile phones, but rivals like the
iPhone, Windows Mobile, etc. are giving it tough competition. People shouldn't
actually select based on the features of the platform but on the availability of
the right application which can give you the desired functionality and at the
same time gets along with your corporate IT infrastructure. You might want to
buy or advise your users to buy a Windows mobile if your organization is a
strictly Windows-based setup. This helps in making sure that your phone apps can
sync out of the box with your business apps and infrastructure. But that's not
the only deciding factor.

What you need to check is how compatible is the platform with the
applications running in your organizations. While taking a buying decision we
also need to use a phone which is a truly business phone with great multimedia
apps. Let's look at the popular smartphone platforms.

Windows Mobile

So, what does Microsoft has to offer to an enterprise? You get an
improvement in the productivity and efficiency as you stay connected to clients
and colleagues with emails, voice mails, IMs etc. With Windows you can sync
information with most of the tools that you already have. For instance, MS
Exchange Server and Office Outlook. This could be a key reason for you to choose
this platform for your mobile business needs.

The current stable version for Windows mobile is 6.5, with the next version
expected to be released in 2010, Windows Mobile 7.0.

Common apps for the Windows Mobile based smart phones are the mobile versions
of the well know Microsoft apps which are available for the desktops such as,
the Mobile Office, Mobile Outlook, Mobile IE, etc. These give a familiar feeling
to the users of these phones who have already worked on the Windows based
desktops. At the same time the synchronization of documents, mails, contact and
calendar is available out of the box. Some key applications which make Windows
Mobile worthwhile for the enterprises are:

MS System Center Mobile Device Manager: Windows Mobile 6.1, combined with MS
System Center Mobile Device Manager helps critical data and systems, simplify
management and helps in lowering costs. The software enables strong passwords
policies such as password expiration, enhanced password history and some
password reset requirements. Remote Device management feature allows
administrators to wipe or lock on-device data, verify passwords.

Collaboration capabilities for Windows phones: With an MS Exchange server
infrastructure, mobile teams can get the added advantage of accessing email
inbox and thus get a scalable, secure, mobile messaging, contact solutions for
Windows phones. The direct integration with Exchange Active Sync and the Direct
Push technology keeps Windows phones up to date over a network connection.

In addition to this, the MS Exchange server 2010, offers advanced
collaboration capabilities such as SMS Sync that let you reply to SMS message in
Outlook Mobile and Outlook Web Access.

MS Communicator: Office Communicator 2007 R2 offers features that include
presence information, IM, VoIP, video and desktop sharing. Some of the new
features that are included in office Communicator 2007, include ability to add
more people to an existing audio-video conferencing session and the sharing of
desktop with a single colleague or a whole team. No matter where you are, it
provides all capabilities across locations and there is no need for a secure
tunnel to the corporate network.

Customer Relationship management solutions: Mobile CRM solution such as MS
Dynamics CRM Mobile for Windows Mobile, gives the power to access the latest and
up-to-date sales, marketing and customer service information no matter wherever
you are.

The benefits include improving the productivity and reduced costs while
delivering better services and thus enhancing customer experience.

Blackberry OS

Blackberry doesn't need an introduction for the enterprise mobile users. And
it has become popular because of the renowned Blackberry push mail services.
This service comes in different flavors. For instance, you can get this service
as a Value Added service from your Mobile Service Provider. Or your organization
can deploy its own BlackBerry server in house on top of either MS Exchange,
Lotus Domino or Novel GroupWise.

The client for this service is available for both BlackBerry handhelds and
desktop computers. Not only this, there are lot of other software apps which are
available for BlackBerry. Most popular mobile apps come for this mobile
platform. The ones which you should look out for are:

Upvise: Upvise is a mobile cloud computing platform for businesses. It is a
complete business siute that includes: projects, tasks, sales and lightweight
CRM. It also gives the users power to access the same application on their PC
with the help of any web browser.

Wireless Database Viewer Plus: With the help of Wireless Database Viewer
Plus, you can easily sychronize, view and update any desktop side database
wirelessly. Any changes made to desktop database will be reflected to your
BlackBerry phone and vice-versa, so you will always be aware of the updated
changes and information. Synchronization with MS Access, FileMaker Pro, Oracle,
SQL Server, and any ODBC is allowed.

iPhone OS X

The iPhone 2.0 software that allows you to wirelessly push company emails,
calendar events, etc to iPhone over a 128-bit encrypted SSL connection, for the
organizations that use MS Exchange Server 2003 or 2007. IT administrators can
securely manage any iPhone containing company's confidential information with
the help of enforced security and password policies. Thus it allows IT
departments to quickly deploy iPhone on the basis of the device configuration
and remote management capabilities. To ensure the highest level of IP-based
encryption for the transmission of confidential and sensitive data, the iPhone
2.0 software supports Cisco IPSec VPN. IT administrators can easily create
Configuration Profiles by enforcing corporate passcode policies and settings.

In addition to this, another useful feature of Configuration profiles is that
they can be used to remotely configure company's VPN, email, etc, thus making
each iPhone secure and ready for business.

Apple iPhone has been given the Oracle business indicator which means the
phone is the first to deliver Oracle business information. Through the use of
this application, the mobile users are provided with secure access to business
performance information. Users can view and interact with some of the Oracle
Business Intelligence applications that includes financial, human resources, CRM
analytics, etc.

A tool for IT administrators called Network Ping allows IT administrators to
ping a single IP address, a subnet, Traceroute, etc. Another app capable of
providing SSH and Telnet, is based on the PuTTY desktop client. It includes
features such as RSA/DSA key generation and authentication, HTTP and works over
Edge, 3G or Wi-Fi.

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