August 23rd is "ROLL OUT NEW POINTSYNC WEBSITE DAY"..!!!

Today is a great day around the office as we launch the new PointSync.com website. For years, our flagship product line needed proper representation online, and now that day has come. Here are some of the highlights of the new site:

General Design:

First, we wanted to have a super clean design that's easy on the eyes, easy to read and easy to navigate. The Home Page is a special place on any site. For ours, we wanted to take a highly technical topic and make it clear what our core value is to a potential customer. A combination of static and carousal style graphics keeps the eyes focused on the important content.

Product Pages:
There is a LOT to talk about with the PointSync Professional product and our developer plugin's & libraries. We wanted to find a place between overwhelming and not enough information, which is tough with such robust products. Take a look at the PointSync product pages for a good balance of screens shots, FAQ, technical info and other information.

Sync "U":
We also talk about synchronizing data a lot around here. Fact is, bullet-proof data synchronization is the core competency built into PointSync Professional . To explain the importance of our synchronization technology and how it fits into the enterprise, we made a whole page dedicated to the topic called Sync "U".

Case Studies:

We're proud to have some well known customers using PointSync Pro. Companies like Craig Hospital, Audi, Inspection Processing Services, FieldSync Assisted Care and others on board as PointSync Customers.

There is plenty more to look at on the site. Please take a few minutes and see what we're doing in the enterprise mobility space. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. See our Contact page for email addresses, phone numbers, etc.

Thanks for reading and visiting our new site!  The URL is: http://www.pointsync.com

PointSync Mobile Technologies

Want to Build Your Own Sync Platform? We did! And Here's What Happened...

Back in 2008, we wrote a super cool mobile app that helps young hemophilia patients track bleed-events that get shared with their doctors and nurses. Back then, the most popular smart phones ran Windows Mobile, so it was written for that platform. The foundation of the solution was our PointSync Pro Mobile Platform.

Fast forward to 2010...MobileDataForce was asked to make an iPhone version of the application because many of the patients had started carrying iPhone's as their device of choice. This presented an issue, because at that time PointSync did not support synchronization and management tasks for anything but Windows Mobile devices.

To solve this, MDF engineers decided to build a sync tool from scratch, using Web Services to synchronize patient events from the iPhone to the database in the cloud. They started out by building the solution with very basic requirements, which consisted of only data synchronization. At completion of this first phase, they were 400 hours and $25,000 into it.

As patients began using it, it became evident that some critical pieces of the solution were missing. For example, when a sync issue came up, there were no auditing or troubleshooting tools to help support staff diagnose and resolve the problem. MDF engineers went back to the drawing board and added basic troubleshooting to the solution, causing the overall cost to rise far beyond the original expectations. In the end, only 10% of the functionality found in PointSync was incorporated into this custom sync solution.

With over 500,000 lines of code and a strong history since 2005, PointSync Pro 2.5 (and higher) now supports iPhone devices. In fact, we now support iPhone, Android AND BlackBerry devices.  If you're considering building your own sync technology for your mobile enterprise solution, carefully consider everything it should do.  Your list should include:

• Data synchronization and application/file deployment
• Cross-platform support for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile
• Support for end-to-end data encryption
• Allow mobile workers to work in a disconnected mode when connectivity is unavailable
• Logging and auditing to help diagnose and resolve technical issues
• Robust integration to databases (SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, SQL Anywhere) and third party systems
• An administrative interface to manage the entire system

At the end of the day, our experience has proven that there's no reason to re-invent this wheel.  PointSync is ready to bolt into your environment right now to provide these necessary functions.  If you need assistance building your mobile application as well, we can help with that too.

For more information on PointSync, please contact our sales team at (208) 384-1200 or visit the MobileDataForce website at www.mobiledataforce.com or the PointSync website at www.pointsync.com.

“So You Want to Use Your iPhone for Work? Uh-oh.”

Just the kind of issues we affordably resolve today for iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile. The key differences from some of the approaches mentioned are that we focus on the field worker, not an office worker in the field. Honestly, who needs 100% access from the field.  For that, give someone a laptop and Citrix for remote desktop access.

We aren’t focused on email or mobile web either. There are major players doing those things well.  Rather, we provide multi-platform support for access to enterprise systems through a mobile app layer on iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile. Your developers – our middleware, PointSync Professional. We do it securely with some of the features and designs discussed in the article, including unique login to company app(s), encrypting info on device and in transit, leaving no sensitive data on the device, and centralized control through PointSync Manager of access and apps on a user and device basis. All the tools an IT manager might need to take advantage of mobile solutions in the field today, all major platforms, all through a *single* management interface.

The reality is that email and internet access rarely are the business solution. There is a real cost to losing data, having to repeat tasks, or partial syncs as a result of connectivity issues. There is a real cost to using email or paper forms as the first step in data collection, requiring further data input, calculations, and effort. There is a real cost to the delays of business processes that don’t have a real-time or near real-time impact on the organization.

Will simplicity, lower cost, and greater capabilities emerge and evolve overtime? Absolutely! But can you afford to try it on the cheap today and fail? Or ignore mobility, the ROI, and the other advantages mobile solutions offer until everyone is doing it? Most of our customers experience ROI of less than 6 months, with some recovering the costs of Enterprising their App™ on a mobile platform in less than 3 months.

Not sure about AT&T being consulted for a MEAP. Here is the Gartner Magic Quadrant in the space.  No AT&T to be found and some pretty big names struggling. Our system is based on Sybase, in its 6^th generation, very stable, and installed at some of biggest names in business, so we are feeling pretty good about our capabilities to support the enterprise in this space.

The reality today is that businesses, government, and other organizations need enterprise class technology to stay competitive, manage costs, and mitigate risks. We bring those capabilities to small- and medium-sized businesses, enterprise divisions, government projects, and SaaS mobility providers. They need to support mobile operating systems other than BlackBerry, provide the security and integration necessary to truly extend the existing systems and computing infrastructure, and to resolve the still very prevalent issues of mobility – enterprise sync challenges, working in and out of connectivity, performance, storage, and centralized management.

Check out the article by clicking on the title above and let us know if you’d like more information to Enterprise Your App™!