Tips for preparing your environment for mobile wireless applications

Mobile technology has become a double-edged sword in the space business. While smart devices and mobile applications have driven productivity in the mobile workforce, they also created new challenges for IT infrastructure.

The following tips will help you prepare your wireless environment to take advantage of powerful hardware and applications that are changing the face of business Company.

Establish a Council of the Disabled

Your mobility Council is the group responsible for overseeing your mobile environment. As a consultant for a number of boards of mobility, we have seen that the most successful meet on a quarterly basis and include key technology and financial executives within the organization.

Some of the responsibilities of your board to mobility include:

* Creation of Role Profiles determine which features get professional mobile device with which the plans, features, applications and accessories

* Update your wireless strategy

* Evaluate the effectiveness of your mobile workforce

* Decisions decisions about changes in your mobile environment

Evaluate your current environment Mobile

Prior to complicate your atmosphere with new mobile devices and applications, you must ensure that you have a good basis on which to build.

When assessing your mobile environment, consider the following areas:

* Procurement - The users get the devices, plans and accessories described in your wireless contract?

* Asset Management - Do you know who has which device?

* An administration fee - Have you consolidated carriers and plans to reduce your wireless spend? Are you getting your rebate?

* Wireless Service Desk - Your end users properly supported?

* Application Support - How mobile applications are currently deployed, updated and supported?

Standardize and simplify

In an ideal world, all mobile applications should run on any device with any operating system. Unfortunately, this is not the case. To make matters worse, the complete normalization is almost impossible for large companies. In our experience, we found that the devices needed for a department may not be the same as those needed for the roles of other circumstances. Sometimes an executive in May prefer one device to another or there are so many types of aircraft already in service standardization seems too difficult.

The key is to standardize as much as possible. Not only will you be better prepared to deploy new technology, but it could also reduce the load on your infrastructure and reduce costs wirelessly.

Own device and wireless number

Employee-owned phones can be a huge liability for a company. Their phone number is there with customers, prospects and suppliers. If they leave, they can take their business emails, contact lists, and phone number with them.

Enterprise applications on employee-owned devices have an even greater risk. It may be difficult to disable access to enterprise systems and remote data confidential in the hands of a former disgruntled employee could be devastating.

Integrated Mobile strongly recommends using a model of corporate responsibility. Not only does it greatly reduces the risk, but it also allows you to benefit from special rates that may reduce your cost wireless.

Determine what activities will benefit from the mobilization

Mobile applications can reduce costs and streamline all areas of corporate sales and customer service to operations and shipping. While virtually any business can be mobilized, there are areas within your company that will benefit most.

Your mobility Council should:

* Check the team leaders - Departments or job roles have challenges that can be solved by a mobile solution?

* Watch your flow of information to mobile workers - Are there any purchase orders, work orders, contracts, forms of service, or other paper documents that can be better managed with a mobile application? Just auto-fill information and eliminate duplicate data entry can significantly improve the effectiveness of your mobile workforce.

* Consider specific mobile technologies - devices that are more mobile phones. Barcode readers, portable computers, mobile printers, and other tools may help you streamline processes and automate manual tasks.

Research and identify Mobile Applications

Once you have determined the functions of management can be improved, the next step is to identify applications that can mobilize these activities.

Some key considerations include:

* Longevity - Whether you plan to deploy applications throughout your enterprise or to specific teams, you must ensure that demand will continue to be maintained and sustained.

* Provisioning - How is deployed and configured?

Updates - How are updates made? Can be done remotely? Are they smart enough to trust the end user?

* Support - Does the media application provider provides or will you be responsible for training your IT staff or outsourcing of support?

* Centralized and Remote Control - For large scale deployments, it is important to be able to manage the application from a central location and make changes remotely.

* Integration with existing systems - The application can work with your existing systems? Is this a seamless integration or will it require development resources?

* Safety - Safety should be a high priority with any mobile application of your choice.

Support Your Mobile Workforce

BES, GoodLink, ActiveSync, and other applications have mobile workers more efficient, but the installed applications is only part of the battle.

To take full advantage of these technologies, you must ensure that your end users are trained and that the applications themselves are properly deployed, managed and supported.

If you're in-house IT staff lacks the training or the bandwidth to adequately support your end users to consider outsourcing your help desk for mobile integrated. We provide certified Level 1, 2 and 3 support, and often a positive return on investment can be achieved by reducing downtime and freeing your resources to help desk to support efforts more strategic .

Do not leave security to the end user

The average user mobile device has no knowledge or experience to keep their mobile device, applications and data secure. Whether you train or supplement your internal IT staff or hire an outside company, such as integrated mobile, experts must ensure that devices are configured correctly, the security measures are implemented and enforced, and data confidential are encrypted.

Make your request updates

Updates applications can be a chore, but they are extremely important. While some may simply extend the functionality, many updates to fix serious problems and patch security holes. Updates applications must be made timely features and changes should be communicated to end users.

Continue to monitor your Mobile Environment

A successful mobile environment requires constant attention. Gather feedback from your end users and make sure that your mobility Council keeps abreast of both positive and negative mobile experiences. This will make it possible for them to make informed decisions about which changes should be made.