I think I’m going to dwell on this much more in depth later on but I just noticed that IBM announced the upcoming release of Blackberry clients for Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr. I think the trend is that companies demand access to key portal and collaboration systems and that vendors are starting to recognize this. Based on what I’ve seen with our clients and my own experience, there are some key challenges:
- You cannot shoehorn a normal user interface into a mobile interface. You need to think it through
- If not done right, this could take more effort than you want with a whole new website just for mobile. I love Portal technology and think there are ways to lessen that effort and re-use what you’ve already done.
- Blackberry has the advantage here because they don’t have restrictive licensing like Apple does. I see very few iPhone applications that are put out by large companies like Oracle and IBM. Blackberry however, has a slew of them. Time will tell if Apple ever eases up on their rules to allow business to publish. Time will tell how Android fits in this picture. I know Android has it’s own set of developer issues I hear on the sites like Slashdot.
Enough for now. Mobile portals will not go away so best to be prepared……..
