Search as the Universal Mobile Gateway
Six months ago, I was one of these guys who never carried around their cell phone. Today, my office is calling me a smartphone addict because I email them while vacationing off in the Caribbean in tropical paradise.
A few times in the past I tried to use PDAs but they always ended back in their box after a few days of fiddling with them. What made a difference this time? Three things: a mobile device (my Motorola Q is even lighter and slimmer than my previous phone), a fast internet connection and a usable web browser. Very quickly I realized that I could use my smartphone for 90% of the tasks I did from my laptop while carrying less than 5% of the weight.
While becoming a heavy user, I also quickly became a frustrated user. With a smartphone you are so close but still so far from full office productivity: Email are downloaded every so often, finding an old email is either impossible (if older than a few days) or requires scrolling down a huge list (I get 200 emails every day not including spam), reading office documents (often in forms of attachments) is a zooming-and-panning-thumb-workout, accessing our CRM system by the self-proclaimed “no-software” king, Salesforce.com, required downloading additional software and accessing most of our office resources (fileshares, knowledge bases, bug reports, wikis) was just impossible.
Being a low power device with great always-on connectivity, smartphones are the perfect thin client. However, a lot of applications are still designed under the old synchronization model designed for poor connectivity that PDAs possessed—emails, contacts and attachments need to be downloaded to the device rather than dynamically fetched from a server. IMHO people have not yet realized that the killer app of a smartphone is the web browser.
That’s when it hit me that the simplest, easiest and fastest solution to all my grievances was just under my nose: search. Being an enterprise search company using our own product, our Intranet search allows us to search securely emails (up to the minute), employee directory, fileshares, our CRM data, knowledge bases, wikis and more. With just a mobile template on top of our search engine I am now able to find and read all my emails, quickly find up to date contact information and access all our office resources.
On top of its main functionality, search takes care of three important factors that make it an ideal mobile gateway:
- Connectivity
- Security, and
- Presentation.
The search engine takes care of connecting to each repository, grabbing the data and the security framework, and converting the data to a text format (HTML/XML) that can be viewed on simple devices. Now, instead of having to build a mobile application on top of each repository (email, DM, RM, CM, CRM, etc) you can just leverage the search infrastructure to make all these repositories securely accessible through the search application.
Does it sound too good to be true? Well, there is a catch. Search only provides a universal “read” gateway, it does not reproduce all the functionality of the underlying applications, just the “access” part. This limitation is a necessary trade off as it limits the complexity of the integration, makes the search workflow very simple and allows search to be ubiquitous. On a smartphone given the limited input capabilities, the ability to “write’ is often non critical. By leveraging your enterprise search infrastructure for mobile access you will be brought a long way toward creating a fully mobile-compatible IT organization.
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