Mobile Applications
Providing access to business systems while out of the office offers many advantages. Communication is improved and business processes can be performed more efficiently across many business functions.>
Because of the advances in mobile networks and devices, sophisticated applications and capabilities can be delivered to the mobile user. And because the networks and devices are now available as commodity items the cost of implementation of the mobile solution need not be that high.
A mobile application example
This is a very simple example of what can be achieved with a mobile application.
The following link shows a simplified field service application which consists of a number of jobs to be performed by an engineer. The user is shown details of each job along with address information and an indicator of the current job status. The job status is presented as a drop down box and can be updated by the mobile user allowing job information to be collected from the users in the field as they work on each task.
Click on the link to see the application run in your browser.
http://www.mobilebeacon.com/jobsweb/dbmenu.html
Select list to view the list of jobs and click on one of the items listed to view the full details, the full details page note the status field provides a drop down which allows the job status to be updated. It can be set to assigned, started, paused or finished.>
The power of this application however comes from the fact that the above link can be selected from a mobile phone. If you open the browser on your mobile phone and go to the above address you should see the same application with same capability to update the status of the job. This will work if your phone supports which almost all phones now do.
So this shows how a mobile application can use the browser capabilities of the mobile phone to present information to the mobile user and allow updates to that information in the field.
If you have access to more than one type of phone you can see the difference in screens displays between different phone models. You can also see how different phones handle things like the status update field. This is one of the complexities of developing for mobile phone browsers. Different phones work in different ways. However if you are developing an application for us within a business environment you will typically have a target device in mind which is the phone used by the business. The application can then be optimised for this particular device.
The other issue with the above application is that it will only work if the browser can connect to the server when the user wishes to use it. If the phone is struggling to get a mobile phone signal then this could present a problem. The solution here is to place an application on the mobile phone which has access to all the data it requires to run without communicating with the server until it has to update the server of the job status changes.
An example of this is shown below. Go to the following link from your mobile phone browser.
http://www.mobilebeacon.com/midlet.htm
You should see a screen prompting you to download a java midlet (application) for your phone. Select the link shown and then the next link which will attempt to download the midlet to your phone.
The following video shows the midlet running on a Nokia E61.
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