Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Disruptive Mobile Tech


I had the pleasure of chatting with Kelly Fee from Capriza today. She did an excellent job of showing me their great looking product for "instantly" mobilising workflows. With this tool web based applications like Sales Force can be turned into mobile applications with impressive speed.

Starting with the Capriza browser plug-in Kelly showed me just how quickly and easily a workflow could be made into a html5 mobile application. At its simplest just step through the workflow as the user normally would, indicate which elements are required in the mobile application, and the app is built on the fly. Sounds easy and it really did look easy. As an example Kelly showed me how to create a mobile application in under 5 minutes with:
  • Log on Screen
  • Recent Leads List
  • Display lead details
  • Edit Leads
While stepping through the workflow to "record" the mobile application a wysiwg display on the side of the screen showed the elements as they would appear in the published application and allowed some resizing/editing. Once finished a look and feel could be applied to the application before publishing it ready for use.

Kelly and I then discussed at a high level some elements such as the architectural model (which can be either hosted or on premise) and the licensing model (which is typically per user). Also what use cases and scenarios would best fit the product and who the users of the product could/would likely be. As a previous business user of Sales Force I've seen the super user type who is always building new dashboards and reports along with the complete opposite users who only log in under sufferance. From a business-IT standpoint I could see that you could defiantly use Capriza to create mobile workflows. And from a Systems Integrator point of view it would be great to be able to use the Capriza framework as a starting point or accelerator to create and pilot applications. Perhaps an advanced mode or developer mode that could be sold to SI's allowing a template to be built or combinations of applications to be joined together like building blocks.

All and all I felt that this was an exciting product that had a lot of potential. Honestly if you have been in enterprise mobility for any time you would know that the simplest looking things are often the hardest to get right. Some things to consider of course are that the HTML5 approach is not suitable for every type of mobile application or use case but if your starting point is a web based application then it will probably fit.


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