We all know our mobile devices are not only for making calls, sending text and listening music anymore. It goes far beyond that and they have become part of our everyday life in recent years — so much so that we like to do almost all our personal and business transactions using some form of handheld devices.
Businesses treat handheld devices as one of the primary channels today to create a differentiator, improve customer satisfaction and more importantly engage customers toward its brand. Enterprises like to build simple, intuitive, innovative business applications and knowledge worker tools for handheld devices so that employees enjoy maximum flexibility with increased productivity.
At the end of the day, it's all about ease of use, engaging users, flexibility, productivity and accessing the right information anytime, anywhere. This is one of the most disruptive innovations that has happened in recent years. With the pace it is moving and the explosion we have seen already, industry is going to see a phenomenal growth of usage of handheld devices like smartphones, tablets across the globe. Businesses definitely like to take this as an opportunity to be part of this transformation journey for good reasons.
Setting the Context
I am going to mention some tools and technology throughout the article. These are just examples and there are other equally good tools are available in the market —you may need to evaluate for your specific implementation. I am not going to focus on any tool specific implementation, rather I will talk about implementation strategy at conceptual level for different scenarios/use case(s) and I will use the names of these tools/technology to make the discussion more relevant. I do not have any intention to promote or demote any tool/technology through this article.
I am not going to talk here on the popular subject of developing mobile apps using platforms like iOS vs. Android, nor will I focus much on the kind of application (native, web application- HTML5 or hybrid) we should build. Though I personally believe:
- Each one is going to stay in its own way and HTML5 will become stronger day by day. Especially with the help of PhoneGap app platform, native APIs can be accessed and compelling interactive apps can be built on HTML5 and this app may look as good as native app. This is certainly an attractive option from a supportability standpoint.
- The decision of choosing a specific/tool technology will depend on the kind of target mobile app (eg. gaming app vs. business app) you are planning to build and the features you like to have in the app.
- Sometimes time to market, target devices, availability of developers in marketplace, profitability, user experience and non-functional requirements (like supportability, security etc.) also drive the technology choice.
You can find two types of enterprises today — some of them have already defined (or in are in process of defining) their mobile strategies for the next three to five years. They have evaluated and identified (or are in process of evaluating) Mobile Enterprise Application platforms (MEAP - like Antenna Software, IBM Worklight, Sybase Unwired Platform etc.) for building/delivering their native or web apps.
Some organizations (enterprises or SMB) still have not decided on specific tools/technology for mobile development because of lack of maturity or for cost reasons, or they prefer to deal with the situation case by case based on priority as and when they come. There is lot of churns in the industry. Every other day there is another tool and technique to build and deliver a mobile application. Good part of it — iOS (Objective C), Android (Java), RIM- - BlackBerry (Java), Windows Mobile (C++, C# etc.) and web app (HTML5) mostly remain the core platform/technologies to build apps for native applications and web applications.
The areas I am going to focus on in this article:
- Why delivering content via handheld device is so relevant in this journey of transformation
- What are the implementation options are available while delivering content across handheld device
Why Delivering Content Across Devices is so Relevant - Some real Scenarios/Use cases
What is mobile content? In loose terms, mobile content is any type of content which is delivered and viewed on mobile devices — it can be anything from graphics, songs, videos, documents, web content, forms, etc. Let us now talk about some of the use cases that involve consuming or delivering content using handheld devices:
- In a typical auto claims processing system (case management), claimant like to take a snapshot of the damaged car and upload the digital picture in the claims application using his/her smartphone while initiating the claims process. The Adjuster and claims processing manager use this information in the downstream content centric workflow to process the claim.
- Passengers within a long flight would be more comfortable to watch movies or listen songs using a tablet rather than using the In-Flight entertainment system. In other words, delivering interesting content via tablet for in-Flight entertainment is another example for content usage for handheld devices.
- No need to mention that enterprise users would be very happy to do the basic day to day business work, involving content centric applications using their tablet starting from invoice processing, bill payment, HR document upload.
- For any publication (book, news etc.) industry, publishing content to Smartphones and tablets is almost mandatory. Delivering news based on a user’s location (location awareness) can add value for the readers.
- If we take an example from retail industry, it's all about delivering personalized digital content of the product to the prospective customer based on customer context.
- Any business would like to make available the relevant web content (part of standard website) across diverse devices to improve the brand and increase the traffic.
This list can go on and on. So there is no doubt delivering content via handheld device is playing a very important role for success of this journey of transformation and enterprises are taking a ‘mobile friendly’ or ‘mobile first’ approach to reach the large number of audiences quickly and effectively.
Implementation Options Available to Deliver Content Across Handheld Devices
There are two kinds of application we talked about above dealing with content:
- Delivering traditional enterprise content (word, pdf, ppt etc.), associated transactional content centric functionality and workflow across devices.
- Delivering web content and associated functionality across devices.
No matter what tool, technology or platform you use for mobile app development, user experience of mobile apps would be treated as the key differentiator for any application you are building. User experience design for desktop applications and mobile apps will not be the same in most cases:
- Mobile App will be task or action oriented so that user can quickly find the relevant information and completes a transaction.
- Mobile Apps should only focus on important information the user will be interested in.
Let us now look at the strategies we have in hand to implement mobile apps for content centric business applications or for delivering web content across mobile devices.
Delivering Traditional Enterprise Content and Content Centric Applications Across Handheld Devices
Mobile App & platform provided by ECM Vendor
Some of the ECM vendors (EMC Documentum, OpenText, Alfresco, etc.) already have made their mobile apps available for Smartphones and Tablets. Mobile apps provided by ECM vendors tend to take the form of some of the select content management use cases like:
- Create, manage, view and search content
- Initiate and review content centric workflow tasks
- Collaboration features like share, comment, discussion around content
- Share content via email
The above list is not complete and will vary to some extent based on the app provided by vendor. Customers can use these apps if they have standard content management needs. EMC Documentum and Alfresco have apps for iPhone and iPad. OpenText supports its app for platforms like RIM BlackBerry, Apple iPhone and iPad, and Google Android. Most of these vendors use REST as the underlying technology to access the ECM repository. Interestingly OpenText and Nuxeo provide a mobile application development platform too so that customers can easily build rich content centric mobile application across devices. The apps provided by these vendors are mostly native apps and the reasons might be:
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Source : cmswire[dot]com
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