'The mobile intranet - increased use of smartphones is putting the office into our pockets - how does that affect your intranet publishing systems and strategy'
Mobile phones have been able to connect to the Internet for some ten years now. But it's only really with the advent of mass market smartphones, like the iPhone, Android devices and RIM's BlackBerry devices that users have started to take advantage of the mobile Internet.
The main benefactors of this mass market adoption of the mobile Internet are consumer applications, consumer websites and, to an extent, business email. However now that consumers are used to downloading data on their mobiles they're asking to do the same thing with their business data and applications.
For many businesses opening up their networks to mobile users creates a double headache as they not only need to open up their network to the outside world, but also have all the problems that dealing with access from mobile devices entails.
Unfortunately, there's not just one solution to the problem, there are tens to choose from and which you choose depends on how secure you want the solution to be, and how much you are going to tailor the site for each different type of mobile device.
Before we get into any solutions let's take a step back and quickly look at the main problems associated with delivering data to mobile. The first problem is detecting the type of device that's accessing your site. Unlike the web where there are possibly 5-10 main web browsers that you need to be aware of, with mobile there are effectively thousands of different browsers, and each one will handle your mobile pages in a different way. And because of all the different operator variants and country differences there's no guarantee that, for example, a RIM BlackBerry Pearl on Vodafone in the UK will display a page in the same way as a RIM BlackBerry Pearl on Verizon in the US. There's also no guarantee that the two Pearls will show a page in the same way within the same organisation.
The next problem is screen size. There are no standard definitions for what a smartphone looks like; the screen size can vary from 2.3" (screen sizes are measured diagonally) to 3.5" and over. Additionally the screen resolution can vary, so a low-end 2.3" screen may be capable of resolutions of 120x160 pixels while a high-end device may have a resolution of 240x320 pixels.
Lastly there's the connection speed, which can be anything from a 3G connection of several Mbps down to a GSM connection of 9.6Kbps a second - that's slower than a modem from the very early '90s. In addition those download speeds can alter depending on where you are, and how may other users are using the same mobile base-station.
So any ideas you have that you're going to send large files over to your users' smartphones should be instantly forgotten. Large files maybe acceptable to download when your users are in towns and cities, but when they move away from urban centres the phone will default back from 3G or Edge to the lowest GSM speeds, where a 1Mb file will take more than 17 minutes to download, and will probably not download at all. Many phones are designed to drop a connection when the download speeds are reduced.
File sizes also bring us to the subject of file types. If you're going to share files with mobile users then you need to make sure that the file types are readable on a mobile device. Flash is not supported on iPhones and many smartphones only have the facility to view files. If you want people to read and edit files then something like Google apps is going to be your best solution. The files are readable and editable within the web app so you can send a much wider range of file types and Google handles all the file sharing, security, and the version control for you.
Google Apps is one of the best ways to test the water if you want to just share data with smartphone users. Because it's a web app, it's available to everyone, so you don't have to spend anything on developing a particular application for a device.
If the data you want to share with your mobile users is on SharePoint then there's now a very quick solution for creating a mobile website that's secure and offers all of the benefits of SharePoint, and that's to upgrade to SharePoint 2010. If you're using SharePoint 2007 to publish content to your site you will need to jump through various different hoops and download and use multiple add-ons to get a mobile version of your data. However if you upgrade to SharePoint 2010 you get mobile almost out of the box.
The latest version of SharePoint will allow you to publish your content as normal, but there are additional features within the package that automatically recognise mobile browsers. It only has a cut-down list of browsers, but it will work for most major handsets iPhone/Windows Mobile/RIM, and creates mobile-friendly versions of your SharePoint site. One of the problems with using a cut-down list of browsers is that there's a chance SharePoint will not recognise a newer phone, and will automatically default the site to a version designed for the lowest specification handset. This is guaranteed to annoy some mobile users but, luckily, Microsoft has thought of this, and SharePoint 2010 allows the user to add more functionality to the webpage if they think their phone can cope. It will also degrade the sites' capabilities gracefully if the phone can't handle a more media-heavy version of your site.
Additionally, as well as the content, the SharePoint 2010 mobile view allows users to contribute to discussions, view and edit lists, and get access to document libraries and wiki pages. SharePoint 2010 also allows you to use SMS to notify mobile users about changes in time sensitive content, such as changes of an important document, or changes of schedule on the calendar. You'll need to have an account with an SMS provider to make this work.
If you want to share an application with your mobile users then things start to get a little more complicated. For instance if you have a must-have ERP application, or a proprietary database application, then you'll need to look at a system that will take your application and mobilise it. You could do this in-house, which means you need to format the application for any of the major browsers and handle the security and problems with variable bandwidth speeds, or you can use an off-the-shelf solution like Citrix Receiver.
By using Citrix Receiver you can mobilise an application or a desktop and allow users to access those virtual applications and desktops from their mobile devices. Users can view, review, edit, and interact with their applications, documents, and data just like they would if they were at their workstations.
Further reading
For more information on how to use SharePoint 2010 the following from Microsoft's technet blog gives you an idea of how to get started. And this helpful blog article has information about SharePoint Workspace 2010 Mobile.
Marcus is a mobile business consultant and edits the Business Mobile (http://www.bmob.co.uk) news and mobile information site.
He started off as a programmer and analyst, but soon moved to Internet and technology journalism, and has spent the last 16 years writing and helping businesses create websites and web communities. As well as editing magazines and websites like Internet Works, Business 2.0, Growing Business, and Startups.co.uk, Marcus also created the Guardian's mobile strategy and launched the m.guardian.co.uk mobile website.
The FreePint Family is a family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success.
'FreePint... provides most of my professional development because it won't come through work and [other resources] just don't cut it.'
FUMSI Forum: Do you have a research question? Post it to the FUMSI Forum, where professionals share Q&A and useful tips on how to Find, Use, Manage and Share Information. It's free.
![[Reuse options]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.png){kind=small}
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
