IM on mobile devices: lessons for enterprise mobility

26 June 2006 by Rod McLaren

I recently put Yahoo Messenger IM on the BlackBerry 8700. It works pretty well, and taught us some lessons:

1. Messenger has some useful design patterns that could be incorporated in enterprise services. Its hooks into the OS allows the device to play a sound (and show you an icon at the top of the screen) alerting you to a new IM message. It’s good on showing you information from other screens. I like that it shows a list of current conversations at the top of your buddy list, it would be even better if it treated IM conversations the way it treats emails and SMS messages: stacking them all in one place in the BlackBerry message list.

But for some Blackberrys it seemed to be hard to install. Alex’s identical 8700 seems to have a different browser on it that wouldn’t access RIM’s download page. So he downloaded Opera Mini to try that, but seemingly RIM won’t let you download an application if you have a non-RIM browser (why do this?). So, two further learnings here:

2. Are applications too easy to install?—as far as IT/Security departments are concerned. This is a question of security policy, and of course related to that of users installing Skype etc on their desktops.

3. Conversely, is it too hard to deploy applications to your target device? Because mobile networks send out varying software images on the same device (presumably it’s a case of “this week, we’re installing this package software and settings on the device, but from next month new 8700s will go with an updated package”), there’s an irreducible amount of configuration to do before you deploy the device. This needs to be bound into operations procedures and, of course, budgets. If you’re lucky, your modern wireless gateway—like BES4+ in the case of BlackBerry—will allow you to manage most or all of this Over The Air.

Of course, the standard answer to 2 and 3 is that BlackBerry Enterprise Server or Windows Mobile Server are the only tool you’ll ever need to control devices and the apps and services you deploy to them. But that said, we keep seeing business requirements that are messier than the scenarios envisaged by RIM and other wireless gateway vendors, resulting in IT/operational policies that need defining and managing outside of—as well as via—the gateway.

Two conditions for successful mobile enterprise services Creating value with web services in UK Criminal Justice