One of the neat things about being an
eProductivity specialist,
is that I have the opportunity to research, test, and deploy a variety
of new technologies for my clients. Before I recommend any technology to
a client, I work with it in-house. If, after a few weeks, I'm still enamored
by the solution, then it will find its way into a recommendation for a
client.
One technology that I have used over the years is a product called Pylon
Pro, which allows me to publish Notes databases to a Palm or Pocket PC
device. I've been helping my clients to deploy the Pylon desktop solution
for many years (since the 1.0 release), when it was first developed by
a small company called Globalware. Now, after several acquisitions,
Pylon seems to have found a home and an outstanding support team as part
of the iAnywhere
family of solutions, from Sybase. The neat thing is that Sybase did not
just add Pylon to their existing family of solutions and park it there.
No, they have continued to develop, extend, and refine the Pylon technology
into their suite of M-Business products.
I am most excited about two products:
Pylon
iAnywhere -- a server-based
tool to extend PIM information from Lotus
Notes or Microsoft
Exchange to any number of
handheld devices (Palm, SmartPhones, PocketPC, etc.), and the Pylon
Application Server, an M-Business
solution that allows me to extend the reach of Notes/SQL/ODBC databases
to a mobile workforce.
This means that my clients can now take the same databases that they have
on their desktops with them on their PDA or SmartPhones. Changes made in
one location are immediately reflected in the other.
This takes mobile computing to a whole new level, as I'm now able to quickly
design and deploy eProductivity applications for my clients which can be
used anytime, anywhere.
This morning, I received a call from Gabe Stanek, a systems consultant
from iAnywhere Solutions. Gabe gave me a private tour of the new Pylon
Apps Server 6.0, which delivers client-side processing to their existing
product. This means that I can now deploy mobile applications that will
do onboard look-ups, validations, and updates to records as they are edited
on the device. My enterprise clients will be quite excited to learn about
this! I can now deploy a database as a mobile application with client-side
logic -- something that used to take days or weeks of development -- in
just a few hours . Nice work iAnywhere team!
I'll have much more to share about this and other productivity enhancing
technologies, when I launch my eProductivity.NET
blog site.