Push email is in high demand for today's mobile workforce. If you have Documents To Go with InTact Technology, you can edit your files from anywhere without compromise. Check out this white paper to find out how.
TInTact Technology :
Cutting the Last Tie Holding the
Wireless Office to the Desktop
October 2006
Executive Summary
Handheld mobile devices have gone a long way to liberate workers from trips back to the office to use their desktop computers,or from carrying laptop computers to every appointment and presentation on their calendars. A new generation of powerfulhandhelds running specialized mobile communications software enables mobile professionals to perform a growing number oftasks once limited to computers. Foremost among them is the fundamentally important task of editing documents in their nativeformats. Software developed for handhelds over the last few years enables them to display Microsoft Office documents with thesame basic attributes - font types and sizes, paragraph breaks, row and table structure, etc. - that computers display. Thatmakes mobile document editing faster and more accurate than earlier methods employing conversion files of plain text.
One stubborn tie to the desktop endures, however. Handheld users must still synchronize their devices by placing them in acradle or docking station hard-wired to a desktop computer. This ensures the changes made on the handheld are merged backinto the original document on the desktop or laptop.
That dependence on synchronizing erodes handheld devices' value by forcing users to rely on their computers for a basic,important business task. This white paper describes the need for mobile document editing tools that maintain original documentintegrity throughout the editing process. It includes a user case study and a technical explanation of how this process worksbetween a desktop and a mobile device.
I. Current State of Mobile Document Review Solutions
The current generation of handheld devices enables mobile business to live up to its name. Laptop computers were supposedto fulfill that role of liberating workers from their desktops, but in most cases they just gave workers a way to bring theirdesktops with them. For all their portability and power, laptops can't be considered truly mobile devices. They're too big, theirpower consumption curves are too high, and their setup time too long to be considered "mobile" if the definition of mobilemeans easy, instant access to text, data, images and messages.
Smartphones and PDAs give mobile employees access to files, e-mail and data via pocket-sized devices that can run for awhole day without a battery charge and require no boot-up time. Mobile office software enables mobile professionals to usehandhelds to view and edit documents in their native Microsoft formats instead of as simple ASCII text. That was a huge stridetoward leveling the playing field between mobile computing and desktop computing. For example, a salesperson going into apitch can now use a handheld to review a page of pricing information as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The same applies forWord documents and PowerPoint slides. All of these tasks once required a laptop.
However, laptops and desktops retain one key capability that keeps them on a higher plane than handhelds; they can displayfully formatted documents. Handhelds cannot display complex document formatting such as animations and macros. Users cansee the text and even embedded graphics in a Microsoft Word document, but not revision marks. They can see a MicrosoftExcel spreadsheet in its original row and column structure, but not accompanying macros. They can see a Microsoft PowerPointpresentation as slides, but not animations embedded in the slides. Users can edit files on their handhelds, but then mustsynchronize their handhelds with their desktops so changes can be intelligently merged with the original files while maintainingtheir rich formatting.
This dependence on synchronization is a serious hindrance to mobile professionals. For example, consider a communicationsmanager circulating a press release written in Microsoft Word for approval. This document may contain rich formatting such asparagraph styles, embedded graphics, stylized text, bullets or numbers, and even a watermark. The manager must send the
Cutting the Last Tie Holding the Wireless Office to the Desktop
press release for approval to the director of marketing, who only has access to his smartphone. He makes several edits to thedocument on his smartphone and e-mails the release back to the communication manager. With today's techn... [download for more]
