Hello list, long time no post!
Daniel Helmer wrote:
> mobilising [ERP] is usually not so much developing a client application, but a middleware that extracts certain infomation from the ERP database and delivers it to the mobile via SMS, WAP browser or whatever platform.
Two major challenges in designing decent middleware:
* dealing with propagation -- Mobile clients tend to be more "disconnected" than their desktop colleagues. This leads to problems when the data in the backend database changed, but on the handset it did not (hope this made sense).
* dealing with multiple client connections -- It does indeed seem ideal to enable every worker to fill in their own time schedule -- until they actually do, and open 857 connections to your ERP subsystem on 18:00 Friday. Before, only a few workers at the accounting department would access these systems, now everyone in your company can/does.
Jeff Funk wrote:
> the problem is that without a std solution, the market will probably not grow.
And without decent coffee, my sentences make no sense. I agree with you Jeff, but please remember that most of the larger companies in Japan use custom ERP systems constructed by the usual suspects of Fujitsu, Hitatchi, etc. Now that their overhead is killing them, they are tuning in to SAP for system "upgrades", getting rid of all the proprietary stuff. The fact that SAP could deliver "off-the-shelve" ERP solutions back in the 80s gave this market its wings, but I wonder if you could speak of a "std" solution -- we need off-the-shelve mobile ERP solutions!
> the question is, as Mr. Helmer implies, what is the specific information that needs to be extracted from the ERP database and in what form should it be extracted? And is it possible to extract and present meaningful information on the mobile phone screen.
Yes, this is all very much possible; you just need to think it over well -- but that goes for normal mobile website design too. The main problem lies in the middleware, not on the client side, as indicated by Mr. Helmer.
> Similar services will probably also be important in the ERP field but I wonder whether the services are mail, site customization, java, or something more complex.
Why not Flash on that mobile screen? Oops, wrong list ;-) But seriously: client-side intelligence is a necessity, and plain web-pages offer no terminal-based functionality. Java or similar is the way to go IMHO.
Regards,
Victor Pikula
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Received on Sun Nov 25 18:16:28 2001