Clever gadgets are no good for keeping in touch with a
mobile workforce unless you have clever software to make sure you
can get the best out of them. Liz Warren reports on how a software
publishing company got to grips with its handheld
devices.
One of the biggest challenges for companies with a mobile workforce
is how to make sure they can keep in touch with the office and with
one another. Mobile phones, personal digital assistants with
network connections and e-mail can all help, but logging in from a
remote site to the e-mail system can be a tortuous process and a
mobile phone that rings in the middle of an important meeting can
be inconvenient and distracting.
With 15 consultants working on client sites, this was a pressing
problem for software publisher ncSoft. "We do like to keep in touch
with our consultants," says Chris Smith, the company's managing
director. "There is also a lot of cross-traffic between consultants
specialising in different areas. In the past, that contact would
have been through phone calls, but that is relatively expensive and
also intrusive when we phone our consultants or they have to phone
us when they are out at a client's site."
The company therefore chose to give its consultants XDA devices
supplied by telecoms company O2. These combine a PDA with a GPRS
mobile phone, allowing users to access the internet and pick up
e-mails. Switching from phone calls to e-mail contacts allows
consultants to deal with contacts when they choose, rather than
having their time with clients interrupted. They can still respond
relatively quickly because they do not have to wait until they get
home in the evenings to log on to e-mail accounts. "Many support
issues need to be resolved more quickly," Smith says, "which was
why people often resorted to phone calls."
The XDAs gave access to e-mail but they were not easy to use. John
Phythian, ncSoft's business development director, explains, "I had
configured all manner of ways of redirecting my mail to my XDA, but
the hoops I had to go through to get even basic access to my
messages meant the service was unreliable, lacked functionality and
was difficult to use." Even worse, Smith says, consultants were
ending up with half their messages on the mobile device and the
other half on their PCs.
Pythian found the solution to these headaches when he was
investigating how ncSoft might use mobile telephony in its own
products. At the Source o2 Developers conference in 2002 he learned
about Smartner Duality, an application which pushes e-mails out to
PDAs automatically: users do not have to go through complex
download processes but simply find all their e-mails waiting for
them when they fire up their XDAs.
In addition, Duality synchronises the mobile device with the user's
desktop machine, so that e-mails sent from the PDA also appear on
the PC.
Smith says ncSoft did look at whether there were other solutions
which would provide similar functions, but could only identify the
Blackberry, a wireless device from Research in Motion, which was
not available in the UK at that time.
He preferred to stick with the software-only Duality because it can
run on a variety of PDA devices. This means ncSoft is not locked
into a particular piece of hardware, and because Duality runs on
standard PDA hardware, it works alongside familiar Microsoft
applications, including Outlook running on the PDA's PocketPC 2000
operating system.
Smith says getting Duality into place was extremely quick - it took
just half a day to set up the first few machines and less than a
week to roll it out to 10 consultants. "We needed to do some
tweaking to Exchange and our mail server and set up a dedicated PC
attached to the network to run the server software, but that was
it," he says. "We have found it to be reliable and easy to
maintain. It does exactly what it is supposed to do, with very
little in the way of problems."
The upshot, Smith says, is that ncSoft now has better yet less
intrusive contact with its staff and consultants can make more
effective use of otherwise wasted time. Smith personally believes
he gains half an hour a day that would otherwise be lost, "Because
if I am on a train or waiting in reception for a meeting, I can
receive and respond to e-mails immediately."
With 15 staff now using Duality and the XDAs, given that
consultants' time is billed at £1,000 a day, Smith points out,
"that represents a significant amount of money when you add it up
over the year."
The company plans to roll XDAs running Duality out to more
employees, including all of its sales force. "Anyone who is out and
about should have one," Smith says.
"Apart from giving them access to e-mail, the XDAs give people all
their contacts and diary information in one place. It has certainly
moved our business along and it is a great thing, as a technology
business, to be using technology to become more effective
ourselves."
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