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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 powerful handhelds running specialized mobile communications software enables mobile professionals to perform a growing number of tasks once limited to computers. Foremost among them is the fundamentally important task of editing documents in their native formats. Software developed for handhelds over the last few years enables them to display Microsoft Office documents with the same basic attributes - font types and sizes, paragraph breaks, row and table structure, etc. - that computers display. That makes 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 a cradle or docking station hard-wired to a desktop computer. This ensures the changes made on the handheld are merged back into 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 document integrity throughout the editing process. It includes a user case study and a technical explanation of how this process works between 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 supposed to fulfill that role of liberating workers from their desktops, but in most cases they just gave workers a way to bring their desktops with them. For all their portability and power, laptops can't be considered truly mobile devices. They're too big, their power consumption curves are too high, and their setup time too long to be considered "mobile" if the definition of mobile means 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 a whole day without a battery charge and require no boot-up time. Mobile office software enables mobile professionals to use handhelds to view and edit documents in their native Microsoft formats instead of as simple ASCII text. That was a huge stride toward leveling the playing field between mobile computing and desktop computing. For example, a salesperson going into a pitch can now use a handheld to review a page of pricing information as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The same applies for Word 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 display fully formatted documents. Handhelds cannot display complex document formatting such as animations and macros. Users can see the text and even embedded graphics in a Microsoft Word document, but not revision marks. They can see a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in its original row and column structure, but not accompanying macros. They can see a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation as slides, but not animations embedded in the slides. Users can edit files on their handhelds, but then must synchronize their handhelds with their desktops so changes can be intelligently merged with the original files while maintaining their rich formatting.
This dependence on synchronization is a serious hindrance to mobile professionals. For example, consider a communications manager circulating a press release written in Microsoft Word for approval. This document may contain rich formatting such as paragraph styles, embedded graphics, stylized text, bullets or numbers, and even a watermark. The manager must send the press release for approval to the director of marketing, who only has access to his smartphone. He makes several edits to the document on his smartphone and e-mails the release back to the communication manager. With today's technology, some or all of the original document's rich formatting could be changed or, even worse, lost from the document. This makes editing files on a handheld or smartphone unrealistic in today's mobile world.
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