Growth of mobile devices is being driven by recognition that they provide a robust platform for letting mobile staff store, manipulate, and create data during interactions with customers or equipment in the field. In the case of notebooks, this data could be anything typically found on a desktop or server; in the case of specialised mobile devices, the data is likely to be a more narrowly focused subset of the enterprise data.
- Introduction
- The disconnected node
- Whole world in your hand
- Building for mobility
- Engineering the business
- Ten steps to good mobility
Such stateless devices are, however, unlikely to hinder the use of mobile devices for increasingly important tasks such as creating records of field activities. Such applications introduce a new problem: while many handheld devices are often connected wirelessly to the corporate network, applications can't take connectivity for granted. Mobile applications need to be built with enough self-sufficiency that they can operate even without any network connectivity, then dump the new data to more permanent server storage whenever a connection is available.
Such is the approach of Kevah, a mobile data entry application from Valorem Systems that securely records, time-stamps, and encrypts digital photographs, notes, and voice annotations using handheld devices.
Its functionality has proved invaluable for companies such as Tenaxe Australia, a security firm whose guards use five Palm Zire 72 handhelds running Kevah to record happenings as they do their rounds around Sydney's World Square complex. If a security guard notices a potential safety hazard or security problem, he or she can photograph it using the Zire's built-in camera. A Kevah algorithm fingerprints the digital image, encrypts it with 128-bit encryption along with the guard's notes, and stores it in the device's memory for later download to the main server.
A similar system is used by maintenance providers to shopping centre management company Centra, which has empowered its maintenance company to automatically fix spills, breakages, and other problems as long as the incidents are documented using photographic evidence from a Kevah-equipped handheld. Images are downloaded and archived on the Kevah server when the handhelds are docked, and the system automatically prepares incident reports that have slashed the time workers spend doing paperwork at the end of a shift.
"Our focus has been to provide the mobility tools for multimedia data capture," says Valorem CEO Jon Tinberg. "Because we're in a Palm environment, the photos get ported into a data repository in our file structure. We're continually pushing Kevah so it will integrate and map into the enterprise system that sits in the fixed infrastructure."
Because they're now being used to create critical enterprise data rather than simply replicating phone numbers from a desktop PC, mobile devices now require far stronger methods for data protection. That includes both data backup -- handily taken care of by mobile device management platforms that automatically run incremental backups when devices are connected -- and more nagging issues of security. No mobile device should, after all, be deployed at all until you've come up with an answer to the most pressing mobile device question: what happens if it gets lost?
This was a question for which many vendors didn't previously have an answer. With the introduction of fingerprint scanners into some models and encryption capabilities into both devices and mobile management platforms, however, current solutions offer several methods for ensuring that sensitive corporate data stored out in the field cannot be used if it falls into the wrong hands.
If you can count on a wireless signal wherever your employees will be working, for example, conventional token-based user authentication may also be an option. Several management platforms offer a "device kill" feature that locks lost or stolen devices out of the corporate network. New PDAs such as HP's hw6515 Mobile Messenger even offer built-in GPS (global positioning system) functionality -- something that will no doubt be exploited by management platforms that could program the smart devices to literally SMS you their current location anywhere on earth.
I just watched a webcast on managing Windows Mobile at http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msecmobility.aspx. I would guess that mobile phone use will grow quickly in the next decade.