Working with smartphones
April 14th, 2008 Posted in Business, TechnologyNow more than ever we are getting requests for mobility solutions, this creates some interesting challanges from a support standpoint. Firstly we are not only talking about accessing your office network from home. We are talking about having all of your information everywhere! Yes everywhere, certainly there must be a magic piece of software that just works…
When a customer tells us they just got a new smartphone and want it connected to their email, calendars and contacts we have to hope they bought the right one. The problem is that there are hundreds of phones with hundreds of interfaces and they all work a little different. For example the day after the iphone was released we got one of those calls. In this instance we had already done our homework on the iphone and concluded there was no way to sync everything. We were able to setup a rudimentary email interface for the phone but no contacts or calendars. What were they thinking?
I personally use a Treo 700wx smartphone with direct push email from our Microsoft Exchange Server, this is probably the most common and reliable way to go mobile. In the next couple of years I suspect our clients to demand more and better mobility solutions, I just hope the hardware developers can keep up.
-mike