Mobility
Mobility solutions cover a number of situations workers find themselves in. It can mean simply being in the office but away from a landline and desktop. It can mean being in transit or at home, at a customer site, in an airport, in a hotel room. Whatever the circumstance, the common need is to access the same communication and information services as if in the normal office environment.
For some, their mobility needs centre on their laptop, for others it is their mobile device. In fact the rate of mobile adoption within the enterprise as a permanent replacement for desktop solutions is fast growing. Estimates that about half of all mobile business calls are currently placed from within organisations implies a shrinking demand for desktop telephones; SIP enabled or not.
This presents technical planners with an increasing community of professional knowledge workers who will expect the same transparent access to enterprise services. Starting points in delivering this include functionality such as the ability to simultaneously ring desk and mobile phones and the ability to shift calls still in progress between devices.
Security Versus Open Access
The technical challenge with mobility is to balance access against security considerations. Intelligent mobile devices integrating voice communications with desktop computing power, such as Blackberries and iPhones, are being configured as mobile-based PBX extensions and are replacing wired desktop telephones as the primary link to the enterprise communications system.
They will need to provide access to services such as directory services, call management, call recording, unified messaging and CRM/ERP type middle office systems. Beyond that, some workers will have additional communication needs. For instance those on permanent standby who can be called up at any time as a nominated expert for live customer service interactions will also need access to presence management and instant messaging.
Apart from special needs, there are also general support concerns that mobility introduces. Given the fact that mobile devices are more likely to be lost or stolen, common policies for access rights will have to be imposed beyond familiar laptop log-on routines. This include all mobiles devices which are enabled to access enterprise systems or offer the user local storage which may then be used to hold sensitive corporate data. The need for automated systems to manage the increased level of password resets will be the least of the problems.
In spite of these challenges, mobility is here to stay since it plays to the need for flexibility, the geographic spread of most organisations and the increasingly significant green agenda that organisations have to respond to. Mobile solutions are becoming access points into the next generation of virtual organisational life.
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Datapoint provides the following technologies and services for Mobility.