Features

The “must-have” device for any “road warrior” has to be the smart phone or tablet. Features range from email only through to everything you would find on a small laptop but with instant access and the convenience of a pocket-size or at least book-size device.

The types of information synchronised between a mobile device and the office which commonly benefit the business user are:

  • Email
  • Contacts
  • Appointments (centrally managed)
  • Task scheduling
  • Industry-specific apps
  • Databases

Benefits

Data collected in the field can be made available instantly, through mobile devices to those back in the office and to other mobile staff. Users can pick up urgent email, or catch up on a backlog during what might otherwise be downtime. If the mobile is properly synchronised with a central office mail server, then each email message can be dealt with once. For example, if you have read and deleted an email on your mobile phone, then when you are back at your desktop computer in the office, you will find the same email has already been removed from your inbox, avoiding the need to deal with it twice. We often find email set up in such a way that email on a user’s desktop computer is simply duplicated on their mobile phone – convenient but not productive as each email has to be checked and deleted (or filed) twice. For this reason POP3 email accounts are best avoided for business use.

The advantage of email on a smart mobile phone over a laptop is the instantaneous notification that an email has arrived. You don’t have to wait while a laptop starts up to check. A quick glance at your phone is enough, even if you miss the alert tone of an incoming email.

Similar benefits of synchronisation apply to mobile access to databases, task-scheduling and other core applications. For example a field agent or sales person who is more productive on the road than back in the office, can gather information from a customer, including text and photographs on a mobile phone and while on their way to the next appointment, office based staff can be create and send a customer proposal. The turn round time could be reduced by days, not just hours.

The recent proliferation of mobile devices (which includes tablets as well as smart phones) introduces a new challenge for the business: how to keep your company data safe. What are the implications of the device being left on a train or stolen? Pronetic has an simple answer to this: our mobile device management service.

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