Mwandama Mutanuka, a colleague of mine who’s involved in business process management (BPM) projects at Perficient, recently authored a blog post about how enterprise mobility can improve clinical research. He started his piece with news that highlighted Eli Lilly’s purchase of 15,000 iPads for employees, starting a few years back. Now, they’re upgrading to the iPad Pro, the most impressive member of Apple’s current lineup of tablets.

Eli Lilly is part of Apple’s mobility partner program, an initiative the computer giant has with approximately 90 companies, according to a USA TODAY article. Partners in the program provide Apple with feedback on the product in exchange for support and business apps. Apple has been attempting to make a dent in the enterprise space for quite some time, so positive revelations from a very recognizable brand in a highly-regulated industry is a big win for the tech giant. 

Download our guide to see 30 examples of digital transformation in life sciences

According to a statement that was issued by Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company purchased the iPads for its sales staff and certain medical liaison positions. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said the transition from laptops to tablets has helped boost sales productivity. With tablets in hands, Eli Lilly’s hope is to enhance the company’s interactions with healthcare providers and boost sales, all while trimming costs.

Now I know why Eli Lilly’s Twitter handle is @LillyPad.

The decades-old conflict between PCs and Apple’s Macs softened a little more this week when IBM unveiled new services that further simplify integration of Macs into cloud-based enterprise environments.

IBM and Apple have had a working relationship for years, but thanks to an expansion of IBM’s MobileFirst Managed Mobility Services portfolio, designed specifically to support Macs, Apple-branded devices can now more easily join networks without onerous configuration and setup, thus simplifying network and email access and application downloads.

This means companies can order Macs directly and start using them in the workplace right away. The expansion also paves a firmer path for “bring your own device” settings (BYOD) so employees can network using their own Macs via SaaS products or client data centers. Either way, IBM clients will experience reduced costs as well as fewer hassles.

IBM was providing similar services on a custom basis for various clients, but with this MobileFirst expansion those services become standard.

If this level of standardization sounds like a no-brainer, consider that Apple’s share of the tech market was rather small – around 10 percent – before the iPhone debuted in 2007 and helped spark the rush toward tech mobility. Since then, as IBM noted in its news release on the MobileFirst expansion, Mac sales have outpaced PC sales nearly every year.

“Ease of adoption and use are at the foundation of every Apple product, and as these devices are used more in the workplace, people expect the same experience they enjoy with Apple technology in their personal use,” Richard Patterson, general manager, Infrastructure Services, IBM Global Technology Services, said in the release.

According to the market research firm IDC, Mac sales rose 16.1 percent year-over-year in the quarter that ended June 30 at the same time PC sales declined. 11.8 percent.

If you are a one of those consumers that has held on to Windows XP and hasn’t made the jump to a new PC yet, consider this… don’t do it! Instead, bite the bullet and spend that little extra to move to a tablet based computer. There is another trend sweeping the market (other than the changes of the operating systems) – that classic PC desktop is quickly becoming a thing of the past. It won’t be long before we all look back and those big square boxes that take up all that table or floor space will be just a memory, something to talk about with our grandchildren. There has never been a better time for a consumer to move to from a traditional PC to a tablet, especially someone who is replacing their XP computer.
Tablets come in a variety of styles, sizes and operating system choices. The main thing to consider when moving to a tablet from XP is making sure it will do the things you used your XP computer to do. For example, if you run specific software, you’ll need to look into making sure the software is compatible with that tablet’s operating system and that the tablet has enough power to run it. Tablets come as small as the palm of your hand to as large as a modern laptop. My favorite is actually the hybrid laptop tablet combo. These have the mechanics and the power of laptops that include the keyboard and standard laptop ports but the displays are touch screen and reverse to convert into a tablet. These are a little more expensive and heavier than typical tablets but are a good choice for those who use their computer extensively for work related functions and tasks.
Tablets come in a variety of operating systems to choose from – the good news and bad news is none of them are like Windows XP. The reason I say it is good or bad is because since all the new OS’s are not like Windows XP, you can freely choose which new platform to go to because you will have to learn any one of them. You have basically 3 choices: Windows 8, Apple iOS (iPad), or Android (comes in a variety of flavors). If you’re looking for budget that will do basic functions like reading eBooks, surfing the Internet or social media, than the Android based tablet would be a good choice. If you need to stick with better performance and are needing MS Office, Outlook email, typical business apps than either Windows 8 or Apple iOS would work. Check to make sure that Apple iOS is compatible to all the things you need.
In conclusion, there really hasn’t been a better excuse or time for someone to transition to using a tablet than for someone still using the XP OS. It’s most likely that the tablet will do what you need it to do, especially because XP is pretty limited when compared with the newer operating systems. Whatever you decide, just make sure you are starting that process now, making backups of your files on your XP machine, and looking into the market for the new device. You never know when that first nasty bug will do  to all your files when it hits your outdated, unsupported XP machine,  so we know for sure staying on XP is not a good idea long term. XP users, I guess it’s time to go shopping. What are you going to purchase?

Finally, Microsoft has delivered an Office App for iPad! You can get it today in the App Store. This is a HUGE announcement. Over a billion people on the planet use Microsoft Office to get more done at work and at home. Whether you’re creating an Excel spreadsheet on your tablet, authoring a Word document in the browser or making edits to a PowerPoint on your phone, you want the great Office experience you love, everywhere you are.
The apps have the robust capabilities and familiar look and feel that is unmistakably Office, while offering a fantastic touch experience built from the ground up for iPad.  With the free versions of the apps, you can read your Word documents, view your Excel data and present with PowerPoint. Your documents will look as good as they do on your PC and Mac®, and better than ever on your iPad.  With an Office 365 subscription, you can edit and create new documents with the iPad. When you edit a document, you can be sure that content and formatting will be maintained across Office on PC, Mac, tablet and phone. And, you always have access to your up-to-date documents in OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.
In addition, Office Mobile for iPhone and Android are now available for free! For more information see the below video and the full Office Blog post.

I am currently in the middle of the car buying process. The one upgrade that stops me every time is the navigation system. I love the idea of having it integrated into my car, but the $2,000 price tag that often comes with this upgrade seems utterly ridiculous given where we are with technology today.
My mobile phone maps are fantastic and they are updated on a regular basis…for free. The drawback is that the screen is small and it’s not integrated into my dash. I also don’t need wireless service on my tablet because I would only need it occasionally.
Today, AT&T announced a $5 day pass for mobile data service and a $25 prepaid plan for 1GB over three months.
Enter the mini tablet + mobile day pass navigation & entertainment device.
A mini is about the size of an in-dash navigation system. When going on vacation or taking a road-trip, you will be able to pay $5 a day to use mobile on your tablet. The mini will become your navigation device. You will still need to determine a way to mount it on the dash, but I’m sure that solution is coming. Cars in the future may not even include electronic devices, but have a space for you to place your own device.
The mini navi/ent device can be used for maps for mom and dad or streaming Netflix for the kids. It’s the ultimate travel device at a very, very affordable price.
What do you think? Would you participate in the AT&T Day Pass?

Your weekly social media news in byte size pieces…

The Bird is Leaving Its Nest
The little blue bird that was born in March of 2006 is finally ready to fly. Twitter has filed for its IPO. With the company being valued at over $10 billion, this is one of the most anticipated public offerings since Facebook went public in May 2012. How did they announce this great news? In 140 characters, of course.

 
Picture This: Instagram with Ads
Instagram has grown to over 150 million users. For those who are counting, that’s a 15% increase since July. History shows us what growth means.
Advertising!
Facebook famously purchased Instagram last year for $1 Billion. It’s about time to see some return on that investment. Will the ads be photos added to the stream? Nobody knows yet. We will have to wait to find out, but expect advertising to develop inside of a year.
Facebook Launches a Search Tool for News Organizations
A handful of news organizations are getting an opportunity to try out a new tool that will allow them to search all public posts by using keywords such as “Syria Vote”  to look inside the chatter on Facebook. Although only available to select news outlets, if it’s successful, this could mean big things for marketers.
Take the Kiddos and Your iPad to The Little Mermaid
Disney is re-releasing The Little Mermaid on September 20th and they want you to grab your kids and your iPad and head to your local theater for a completely different (and bright) movie-going experience. We all know what it’s like to have two screens going at home, but now you can pay big bucks to sit in a theater with dozens of people all on their iPads singing along karaoke-style. If you want to give this new experience a try, download the app before you go under the sea.
Trending topics on….Facebook?
First comes hashtags, then comes trending topics. It had to happen, right? A very small percentage of users are now seeing a trending topics listing on their Facebook page. Much like twitter, the trending topics are a measure of what people are talking about on Facebook. If it is a successful test, it could become available to all Facebook users in the near future.
 
And a Few Crumbs…
A Romanian Coca-Cola TV ad is the first to include live tweets.
You can now embed Google+ posts on your website.
Facebook makes all ad images bigger and of uniform size.
If I knew you were coming, I’d have baked an Instagram cake and served it with Facebook flavored ice cream.
Social media usage by adults in up 800% in just 8 years.
Facebook’s Head of Consumer Marketing flies over to twitter.
 
Which byte did you find the tastiest?
 

Good news this morning for those using SharePoint 2013 and SkyDrive Pro for business collaboration and content storage / backup. Microsoft announced the news today (okay, technically yesterday) over on the Office 365 blog:

We are pleased to announce that the SkyDrive Pro apps for Windows 8 and iOS are now available in the Windows Store and Apple Store respectively for SharePoint Online users in Office 365. After signing in to your Office 365 account, you can access, view, and upload your documents from anywhere.  
You can use the SkyDrive Pro apps to view documents in your SkyDrive Pro folder, select specific content to take offline when you are traveling or have low bandwidth, organize your content by creating new folders, and upload new content and share with others.

From a strategic perspective, the same-day release of Apple and Windows apps affirms a real commitment on their part to cross-platform interoperability with iOS– still the leading tablet/slate OS by a long shot– and that’s good news for users of any stripe.  Most people just don’t care about the old “Mac vs. PC” argument and just want the ability to use Office (which they like) on their iPads (which they also like).
Here’s some quick thoughts on the practical implications of this announcement:

• “Access, view and upload” is great news and more than what we’ve ever seen before from an “Office on the iPad” or phone perspective.  Great stuff!
• The flip side: “access, view and upload” doesn’t include “edit”.  There’s a reason for that and it isn’t form factor.  The creation/editing experience is intrinsically richer on the PC and Microsoft has a vested interest in keeping it there.
• These apps are for SkyDrive Pro for Office 365 users only.  It’s not for on-prem SP 2013 and it’s not for the consumer SkyDrive service.
• Yes, the absence of Android is unsurprising.  The Microsoft/Google divide isn’t being bridged anytime soon. This is the elephant in the cross-platform room, and it’s not going away just yet… but who would have imagined Microsoft building apps for iOS back in 2005? Progress is progress if you ask me.

The SharePoint 2013 Social Newsfeed is now available in Apple’s App Store. That’s right– you can access the social side of your SharePoint intranet on an iPad in a slick, easy-to-use way.  (Please excuse my low-resolution screen shots– there’s much better examples on the official iTunes page.)

From a UI perspective, there is a lot to like here.  It’s basically the Windows 8 / Windows Phone “Metro” look ported to iOS.  This doesn’t look like other social apps we’ve seen– it looks like SharePoint.  That’s a win.

Far more important to many of us, though, is this:  Logging in is free of the obnoxious multiple prompts that you’re regretfully used to if you’ve ever tried hitting secure SharePoint sites through an iOS Safari browser.  With the app, you sign in once when you boot up the app for the first time… and that’s it.
All this, and it’s free.  Thanks, Microsoft.  This will work out really well until I get my Surface Pro.
(Special thanks to my colleague Eric Luke for the tip– shared on our SP 2013 newsfeed, no less!)

Unless you have been living “off the grid”, it was difficult not to know that the rumors which have been swirling for months were true and Apple released a 7” iPad Mini.  Despite the opposition of such a device by the late Steve Jobs, Apple has seen the success of Android-based 7” tablets such as the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7”, Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7″ and the Nexus 7” and could not leave the market to competitors to exploit.  Steve Job’s remark at the time was:
7-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad. ….7-Inch tablets are dead on arrival.
However, what has been discovered is that people who use the 10” form factor over a length of time find that it is fatiguing to use one-handed (such as treating it like a paperback and reading or a student using it as an electronic textbook) or awkward to store and use in particular situations.
In the case of enterprises, as an example, they have made a large investment in mobile around the use of tablets on the store floor. Retailers have provided tablets to their on-floor sales people in order to provide answers to questions that buyers may have about an item or inventory information in order to provide a higher level of sales service and keep the sale in-house. However, holding a 10” tablet all day begins to fatigue the user.  The same holds true for the healthcare industry where mobile has also started to make great inroads.  While the 10” tablet makes for a great patient medical chart, it does not stash easily into the scrub pockets that many medical people wear, however, the 7” form factor tablets do.  The same would go for a business person in that a 7” tablet may fit in a suit coat as they rush off to a meeting.  The 7” tablets give developers a large enough screen to build out sophisticated mobile business apps and are not limited by the smartphone screen size.
The lower cost over their larger brethren opens up their use to a wider audience such as hand-held POS systems for the holiday shopping season (portable checkout stations for high demand areas of the store) or an app-specific rollout to a particular department (think giving a mini-tablet in kiosk mode to overnight stock people for inventory maintenance).  Rather than muddying the product choice waters as some mobile industry pundits have claimed, the release of the Apple iPad Mini has validated the 7” tablet segment which opens up a new area of mobile use where smartphones screens are too small and limiting, the 10” tablets too large or expensive for a particular enterprise’s purpose.

Objective-C on the iOS platform continues to rise in popularity. Between iOS and Android platforms, now there are close to 1.6 billion apps. This is a phenomenal number of apps. Given this explosion, it is but natural to see the proliferation of some excellent open source frameworks on social code repositories like Github and Google Code.
This proliferation in turn has enabled better apps to be created at faster rates. Great programmers who found gaps in what the platform lacked during their own app projects, ended up creating these reusable framework.
For this post, I studied two popular apps on iOS: Facebook and Spotify to reveal the secrets of some of the open source frameworks employed by these apps, with the hope of using some of these in your own project.
  
Category: Data Exchange
Data exchange is where your app needs to interface with some server application programming interface(API), whether your own or some third-party services like Foursquare, Yelp, Google, etc. Prior to iOS 5.0 there was no native way to handle data exchange based on JSON and a lot of open source frameworks filled this need. JSONKit and SBJSON are among two most popular.
1 & 2: JSONKit or SBJSON:
JSONKit is used by both Facebook and Flipboard, whereas Spotify uses SBJSON. Notice that Facebook abandoned SBJSON to move to JSONKit for the latest versions of its apps.
3. KissXML: Used by Spotify, this XML framework is built for speed and reliability and acts as drop-in for the built in NSXML framework.
4. Protocol Buffers ProtobufObjC: An Objective-C port of the Google Protocol Buffers. This protocol originated at Google and is an alternate to using XML. It is fast and language neutral way to describe data. Using the compiler, you can produce the code to read/write objects that look like native objects in your platform. Both Facebook and Spotify apps make use of this.
Category: Dealing with Images
Facebook apps deal heavily with images served over the web. So it was interesting to explore what types of open-source frameworks were being deployed to deal with fetching, resizing, reshaping and caching images.
5. 6. & 7. UIImage+Alpha, UIImage+Resize & UIImage+RoundedCorner: This framework improves the built-in UIImage class by adding capabilities like manipulating the alpha, the size and providing ability to round corners of any image.
8.  SDWebImage: Used by Facebook, this framework offers a lot of built-in functions to make life easy if you need images to served up from the interwebs. First, this framework offers asynchronous downloads. Second, it has built-in caching support to avoid downloading the same URL multiple times.
Category: Crash Reporting
Even great apps crash. Good teams like to watch crash reports closely and fix holes proactively. Unfortunately, the built in crash reporting system by Apple is not adequate for many needs. Therefore, the following frameworks stepped in to fill these gaps.
9,10 & 11: HockeyKit, QuincyKit & PLCrashReporter: Developed by the same developer, these two frameworks offer ability to stand up your own ad-hoc beta app distribution service and incorporate live crash reporting. This situation would be akin to having your own internal TestFlightApp portal and framework available. These frameworks are used by the Flipboard app. The PLCrashReporter framework is at the heart of QuincyKit.
Category: Text UI Controls:
12. HPGrowingTextView for iOS: This control is a multi-line autoresizing UITextView. It resizes itself as the user is typing. Both the old and new Facebook app use this control for the “status update” text box.
13. & 14. CoreTextHyperLinkView & AutoHyperLinks: CoreText framework is an alternative to using UIWebViews inside your apps to layout text. The CoreText framework offers great control in how the print looks without needing to render HTML. But there is one problem, if there are hyperlinks in your text that you wish to render as tappable links, there is no native support for this feature. Enter CoreTextHyperLinkView which auto-detects hyperlinks in the rendered text and makes them tappable. This control is used heavily in the News Feed section of the new Facebook app.
15. QSUtilities: Used by Facebook app, this framework has some good utility code to read/write Files for apps, general purpose string manipulation functions like escaping for XML, encoding/decoding, trimming etc.
16. RegexKitLite: This is not strictly an iOS library but it is used by Flipboard instead of the native regex functions in iOS. This stackoverflow thread discusses how to compile and link it to an iOS project.
Category: Grids and Layout:
17. AQGridView: Before iOS 6 incorporated the fancy UICollectionView, the AQGridView was the go-to grid view for many many apps. It is very flexible and is used by many leading apps such as Facebook, Spotify, and Kobo ebooks.
Category: Logging:
18. CocoaLumberJack: NSLog is simple to use. But its not very fast. And its not very extensible. To those who have used other logging frameworks in other platforms, NSLog may appear limiting. Fear not, because there is a drop in replacement for NSLog called CocoaLumberJack which makes it snappy to put log statements in your code, direct the output to multiple loggers, leave in the code without worrying about #ifdef statements to prevent it seeping through into the production code. This framework is used by both Spotify and Facebook apps.
Category: Messaging:
19. mosquitto:  This is a MQTT protocol based messaging framework for low powered devices. It is used by Facebook (but I could not figure out for what?). This framework enables machine to machine communication based on the MQTT protocol. An experimental project on Github shows how to use the iPhone to turn on or off an LED.
Category: Device Identification:
20. OpenUDID: OpenUDID is a drop in replacement for Apple’s UDID. It is adopted by many apps since Apple has restricted access to the UDID to uniquely identify a device and a user.

Conclusion:
As you can see there are a lot of useful open source frameworks that power some of the best apps on the iOS platform and their count will only continue to grow. However, watching the about pages of the apps you like may reveal the secrets of creating your own powerful apps.
 
 
 

PerformancePoint, Reporting, and Excel Services on an iPad… it can’t be.  It is a fact.  What? You don’t believe me check out this link and see for yourself.  This feature was included in the December 2011 SharePoint 2010 CU. 
However, I have some bad news if you have recently updated to iOS 6. The tap and hold functionality to bring up the context menu no longer works in Safari or Chrome.   Womp waaa….
 
I have not found any news on when or if this will be fixed by Apple. Bring on Surface!
Now you may be asking yourself, “I wonder if this guy has even tried it”, well…
 

Last month I told you about the features Microsoft Dynamics CRM is rolling out as part of the “CRM Q2 2012 Service Update” which will include massive improvements and capabilities around mobility and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  As most of you have heard by now, Microsoft has just announced its newest mobility device the “Surface”, which is a tablet, iPad like, reader like, device that will be available in Microsoft Stores later this year.  There is a great article on the Surface device on ZDNet by Ed Bott  that covers a lot of the questions people like me who haven’t physically got to put my hands on one are asking.  I do have several colleagues at Microsoft that have had the opportunity to try it and all of them have told me to get rid of my iPad because the Surface is simply “aaawwweesomme”!   Well that is fine and good for me because I use my iPad for email, book reading, and consumer type activities, but what about if you are a VP of Sales and you just rolled out iPad or Android Slates to your sales staff or service staff.  Well, the CRM Q2 2012 Service Update has you covered due to the cross-platform support.  Most major platforms will be supported, so rest assured, your investment wasn’t just wasted. 
This leads me to my next topic that I get asked a ton…does Microsoft Dynamics support any other browsers other than Internet Explorer.  Guess what folks, the CRM Q2 2012 Service Update will include cross browser support!!!!  Yes, I hear all of my Google Chrome fans screaming for joy.  I really am optimistic about actually loading another browser on my laptop now that Dynamics CRM will work with it.  I have resisted until now, because to me it was just overhead, but my college aged daughter came home from school a few weeks ago and loaded it on my wife’s laptop and I have to say, Chrome was nice.  I found it integrated really well with outside content without some of the quirks that I see in IE.  I really can’t wait for the service pack to be released so I can use Dynamics CRM in other browsers and put it through its paces!

 
As always, thanks for reading and look forward to more information once the Service Pack is released.