Device operating systems, features, and formats continue to proliferate as handhelds take on increasingly specialized functions. For example, despite the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, media-optimized devices often provide the poorest email solutions, and entertainment-optimized devices are often the heaviest and have the weakest battery life. This problem is compounded in business settings where CIOs are notoriously reluctant, and often unable, to commit to a single device model company-wide.
Law 3 addresses this: mobile applications must adapt to mobile devices — not the other way around. In Mobile 1.0, vendors designed solutions for particular hardware, but most of them failed.
Today’s enterprise users demand support for the devices they already own, which almost always means consistent support for multiple mobile operating systems and models is a requirement. In reality, most corporate device strategies involve three or four device types and one or two carriers. A common scenario in IT organizations is that mid-level and senior managers use iPad, iPhone, or BlackBerry devices; field techs carry BlackBerry or “ruggedized” Windows devices; and help-desk analysts and problem coordinators have BlackBerry or Android smartphones. Today, these are a combination of corporate-issue and employee-owned devices, with the mix increasingly shifting toward employee-owned devices with network access and business apps supported by corporate IT.
Mobile applications designed to support the Mobile 2.0 enterprise must support this range of devices without any per-device configuration. The right way to do this is for the Mobile Gateway to store profiles for each device and the client-side application to automatically access them. That way, new device profiles can be added to allow only optimized content to be delivered — without any need to change the underlying application or mobile settings.
By: BMC Software