Wireless
Messaging
Moves into the Enterprise
by Geof Wheelwright, Write of Way
Media Services
(Originally published in Messaging Magazine, May/June 1999)
Large corporate users of network and computer systems are increasingly demanding ways to stay in touch with their network, electronic messaging system and collaborative computing environment. Sales of messaging and collaborative computing applications such as Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise have enjoyed strong growth in the past several years. In adopting these products, major corporations have moved to enterprise-wide solutions that move beyond basic messaging into a rich, messaging-based environment that can become a development platform for collaborative applications.
One major challenge, however, has been in finding ways for mobile users to participate in this rich environment. If you look at the range of products and devices available to address the needs of traveling executives, service technicians and the outbound sales force, they have varied widely in capability from the simple one-way pager to the notebook computer with wireless modem, lots of processing power, memory and storage (see Figure 1).
Each of these potential wireless solutions to the problem of how best to integrate mobile users into a rich, enterprise-wide, messaging-based network has typically carried with it some level of compromise. Pagers can typically only carry short, text-based messages—and only those based on a more advanced paging infrastructure can provide two-way data capability.
Even those pagers that do offer tiny keyboards and two-way communication cannot handle messages of any significant length. In addition, they are not equipped to deal with the Internet mail or corporation electronic mail messages that contain attached files or rich data types (such as meeting requests, corporate telephone directory updates and task lists). The same is true of most of the "smart phones" available today.
The story only starts to change when you move into the handheld computing and notebook computing end of the spectrum—where the devices, operating systems and client software have the necessary processing power, memory and storage to handle the complex data types used in modern messaging and collaborative computing environments.
A True Enterprise Solution
So what does it take to create a strong, robust, powerful and flexible wireless messaging
solution? What are the needs of major corporations when they roll out such a solution? To
start with, such solutions must be able to integrate tightly with the corporation’s
existing messaging infrastructure.
In the past, wireless messaging has been something of an afterthought. The classic wireless messaging solution is a simple alphanumeric pager. Yet messages sent to a pager cannot easily be archived, tracked or responded to within most corporate messaging infrastructures.
Even the changes achieved through recent pager innovations have not made a huge difference to this situation. Although it is now possible to have pager messaging to and from Internet e-mail systems, these solutions still exist largely outside of standard corporate messaging solutions such as those built around Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise and Microsoft Exchange.
The same problem faces messaging systems based on cellular telephony and SMS (Short Message Service) technology. They may be great minimalist solutions to the problem of how best to send short text messages to remote users, but they do not tend to integrate well with a corporate messaging system. And, as the underlying messaging systems become more complex and support more complex data types within messages, the gap widens.
This is because messaging systems are increasingly becoming complete platforms for enterprise-wide application development—rather than merely a method of passing text messages around. A product such as Microsoft Exchange, for example, has become the transport for messages within applications that deal with scheduling, project planning and sales force automation—as well as standard electronic mail messages.
This means that any wireless solution that will be used in an enterprise that deploys Exchange server software and Microsoft Outlook (the Exchange client software) must also be able to handle this rich and diverse set of data types. This means that an organization that deploys a sales force automation solution built around Microsoft Exchange cannot use simple wireless e-mail clients in order to make the most of the solution. The solution must be integrated properly with the enterprise-wide messaging service to be effective.
How it Works
To get a sense of how a true, integrated wireless messaging solution works, it’s
worth spending a few minutes looking at a real-life example. Vancouver-based Infowave
Software, for instance, has developed a new suite of products, all built on top of the
Infowave Wireless engine.
In any messaging system, you need to have ways of providing security, optimization and authentication. In this solution, the wireless messaging "engine" does all those jobs over wireless networks. The key to its effectiveness lies in abstracting the complexities of wireless network communications from the application.
The engine typically consists of both client and server components. The client component should run on multiple platforms (such as Windows NT, 95, 98 and Windows CE). The client software provides multiple hooks into "plug in" modules. These include one that allows users access to their Exchange Server via an Exchange client and another for the World Wide Web (which does the same for users accessing the World Wide Web and corporate intranets wirelessly via a Web browser).
The server component of the engine services all client requests, manages authentication, security, provides efficiency through use of protocol optimization and compression and services all client requests to the plug in modules (see Figure 2).
Using the engine, this solution inherits wireless network support, reliability, efficiency, security and authentication. On top of that, it provides specific optimization for Exchange including MAPI conversions for CE, message property translation, message header previews, and many other features. It allows multiple clients (laptops and CE-based devices) fast, simple access to corporate systems.
A wireless Web browsing solution, meanwhile, provides a proxy for standard Web browsers to allow them to wirelessly access Web pages using standard protocols and methods. With very little setup required on the client, HTTP and HTTPS can be routed wirelessly to the user’s browser.
Such an approach removes extra overhead associated with the HTTP protocol, packages the data, delivers it to the client quickly and reliably. It also includes filtering rules (which can be set by user preferences thus allowing filtering of unnecessary data over the wireless network).
Delivering the Message
But how does this work in the real world? According to Fred Centanni, Director of
Electronic Commerce Strategies at EG&G, Inc., it can make a big difference to the
"reach" of a corporation’s messaging system.
"Our experience with our initial deployments has been great," he reports. "Our problem was similar to that experienced by most very large, multinational global companies…we have a large number of middle and senior management executives who spend a significant amount of their time on the road. That fact notwithstanding, they must keep connected with not only the corporate office, but also with our various SBE’s (Strategic Business Entities). All are equipped with laptops or sub-notebooks and even a few CE devices, but the issues were where, when and how to connect. We use a worldwide network service provider to give us a POP in virtually any city in the U.S. All our users needed to do was to run a program to identify the local access number and then attempt a connect. Sounds good…but the problems are that each hotel may use a different outside line access (9, 8, etc.) and asked questions like: ‘Where do I find an analog line at the airport? Where do I connect at a customer’s site?’ And so on."
And that’s where a wireless solution came in. "With wireless messaging using Infowave for Exchange, these problems all go away," says Centanni. "Indeed, the entire paradigm concerning how we operate when traveling changes. If you desire, you are essentially ‘always’ connected—at the airport, in the car, at your customer, etc.…no more waiting until I get back to the hotel to do my e-mail."
In terms of the direct impact on his company, Centanni said that supporting remote users of electronic mail has become significantly easier since it went wireless because less support is required. He also reported that traveling executives have enjoyed a measurable increase in productivity since the company started using wireless messaging technology because they actually use e-mail when travelling—rather than waiting until they get back to the office.
EG&G, Inc. also reports that it has been able to improve customer service by being able to respond instantly to electronic mail messages from remote users. He concludes that the two biggest benefits of this solution are the flexibility to connect to the corporate Exchange server anywhere, at any time—and the ease of use to make that connection simply.
Meanwhile, Randy Allen of Litton PRC Inc. agrees that flexibility and the potential to improve customer service have been major benefits of wireless messaging. Allen, who is the company’s chief engineer in the Office of the CIO, says that improving customer service has been a real bonus. "This is a plus," he says. "We get messages from folks when they need to talk, not later after they’ve found a phone line. It allows us to respond to something a lot more like ‘real-time’."
Allen adds that being able to use the solution on notebook computers and Windows CE-based handheld computers—along with the ability to directly access the Exchange Server (rather than some intermediate mailbox)—are the two biggest wins his company has achieved from wireless messaging.
For Carol Trainer, the Business Technology Analyst in the Information Services Division of The David J. Joseph company, the ability to exchange sales data in real time has also played a major role in the aggressive adoption of wireless messaging. David J. Joseph boasts the title of "world’s largest processor and broker of scrap iron and steel" and has to make use of every competitive edge in order to maintain its market lead.
"In a competitive industry such as ours, waiting until the end of the day to upload and download messages is just not effective," she says. "(Wireless messaging) has given our field staff a way to exchange timely sales and market information when it is needed most."
Looking Toward the Future
So where does wireless messaging technology—and the solutions built around it—go
from here? It seems that future solutions will become ever richer in data types, will make
use of high-speed wireless data communications options as they became available and will
all need to integrate in a comprehensive, standards-based environment.
There is every evidence that proprietary solutions stitched together through gateways, mail forwarding and other patchwork technologies will have to give way to those that work with market-driven standards to create seamless, flexible and comprehensive solutions. MM