ComputerUser On Palmtop Mania
Personal Digital Assistants Are Cheap And Ever More Useful For Business And More
By Don Fitzwater and Ken Henningsen, ComputerUser Magazine Contributing Editors
January 24, 2000, 12:33 p.m. EST
 Personal digital assistants -- aka PDAs -- are becoming commonplace in today's business world, largely as a result of 3Com's Palm Pilot series of products. Many factors have combined to produce this new popularity. The current crop of PDAs is cheap enough to be purchased without making a major dent in the corporate budget. The user interfaces and applications are now extremely functional, and their connectivity and integration with PCs and networks have reached a genuinely useful level. In short, PDAs have evolved into information tools with genuine corporate uses. Cheaper Than A Laptop PDAs can provide a business or organization with a variety of benefits. For businesses with far-flung employees, it may no longer be necessary to supply mobile workers with notebook PCs: Cheaper PDAs may be adequate in many cases. Sales representatives are beginning to use PDAs in conjunction with laptops (and sometimes instead of them), since they make good portable schedulers, contact databases and note-taking devices. And unlike the laptop or notebook computer, a PDA is more likely to always be on hand for the employee because of its compact nature.Mobile executives use PDAs for many of the same reasons. Anyone whose job involves meetings outside the office can make the case for getting equipped with a PDA as a cost of doing business more efficiently. A Lack Of Guidance  But as in the early days of PCs themselves, if a company doesn't buy and manage PDAs for its employees, the employees are likely to buy whatever they want -- and still expect their company's tech-support department to provide assistance when it breaks down. An information-technology department that wants to be cost-effective would be well-advised to take actions to limit the variety of PDAs that the company's employees will be buying while still providing workable solutions. One thing is certain: A company that wants to be forward-looking in its use of technology tools would be wise to make sure its IT department is factoring PDAs into its workload. FYI: PDA = HPC, OK? The term "PDA" is a fairly loose designation. In fact, Microsoft has tried to come up with its own redefining moniker for these ultraportable products by calling them HPCs (handheld personal computers).Regardless of whether you are talking about a PDA or an HPC, the names apply to a wide range of devices, ranging from Franklin's credit-card-sized Rex (pictured, above right) to Windows CE devices like Toshiba's Libretto (below, left) that are nearly as large as Windows 98-based products. About the only common factor that distinguishes PDAs from larger portables is a lack of any sort of mechanical mass storage, for reasons of size and power consumption. But even that distinction is fading: It is possible to fit a hard disk into a PCMCIA/ PC Card slot and plug it into a PDA.  While PDAs themselves may not be avant garde anymore, most of the people who use them formally throughout an organization are what you would call "early adopters," ahead of the mainstream. The idea of an entire sales force having the corporate sales database in the palms of their hands is attractive, but it may not be as easy to implement as the concept suggests. So before settling on one PDA platform, it is best to study your options carefully. What They're Good For In business, the usefulness of PDAs falls into three big categories:- Portable access to personal information such as e-mail, contacts and schedules.
- Portable access to corporate databases and business processes.
- Highly customized gathering and disseminating of data for manufacturing enterprises, product distribution or sales operations.
Integrating PDAs into the corporate information-technology infrastructure generally revolves around major issues like compatibility and security. For a PDA to be useful, it must integrate easily into your existing systems. It is usually possible to integrate any PDA with almost any data source if you have a techie around who can create the necessary data-conversion scripts. For portable access to personal and corporate data, the PDA will be used as if it's a networked PC, and a tech-support department should respond to complaints as if it's a networked PC. Of course, with a PDA, that's easier said than done: It is usually not permanently connected and it is most definitely not a PC. In general, there are no good ways of managing PDAs from a centralized point, as IT traditionally does with corporate desktop systems. Easier To Carry -- And Steal Security is a real concern with PDAs, and there are only a few ways to improve the situation. Although most PDAs can be set up to demand a password before allowing access, this is normally the only barrier between a potentially naughty person and your corporate data. And PDAs are notoriously likely to fall into the wrong hands. Firewalls cannot protect information that has been left behind in the local restaurant or airport waiting area. But the popularity of the PDAs and their growing usefulness to the enterprise has spawned a flurry of activity to overcome each of these issues. Microsoft is just beginning work in this area, although it claims to have much of the technology in place. There are solutions appearing in the marketplace as this article goes to press, however. Some are relatively new (and are likely to suffer from bugs and quirks just like any other immature product segment), while others have been around the block a few times. As always, it pays to do your homework first. Regardless of how you choose to implement PDAs within your organization, you will need to address information security in one form or another. Other than enforcing the use of password protection on each individual's PDA, if you have sensitive data, you must either implement additional security on the PDAs that can access it or institute policies that forbid taking sensitive information out of the building in an insecure form. Security can be addressed in a couple of different manners. You could consider leaving the most sensitive data on the server: Users must dial in to look at it but never have permanent copies of the data in their own storage. If it's necessary to allow downloading data to the PDA, consider buying an encryption software package that will make documents more secure when they're sent to the PDA. Wide Range Of Options So you've recognized that PDAs can have some sort of place within your enterprise -- just what sorts of product offerings are available? Here are just two of the many alternatives. Oracle and 3Com have teamed up to bring enterprise data access to the Palm Computing platform. The partnership brings a broad range of mobile enterprise computing solutions and services to the growing handheld computing market, including the integration of Oracle Lite Database with 3Com's Palm III and Palm Pilot Professional connected organizers. Synchrologic Inc. markets its SyncKit data synchronization component for the Palm Computing platform. Developers can use the plug-in SyncKit component to rapidly build corporate client/server applications that support mobile users of Palm Computing devices. With SyncKit, application developers can add data synchronization to their applications, enabling users to run the application while not connected to the central server. The version of SyncKit for the Palm Computing platform supports bi-directional synchronization with a Palm and a desktop or laptop, as well as directly to the enterprise database server. Application developers can use the native Palm object store, or databases from Oracle, Sybase, IBM or Microsoft on either the server or handheld device. If you think your mobile workforce can benefit from smaller, more portable computers, it makes sense to explore the PDA option -- not just as an add-on to the laptop, but as a legitimate replacement. PDAs won't replace laptops for all your workers, but for those who can do their jobs on the road without the laptop, they could help you achieve lower cost of ownership. ComputerUser Contributing Editors Don Fitzwater and Ken Henningsen are principal partners in Interface Solutions, a Minneapolis consulting firm)
Copyright 2000 by ComputerUser.com Inc., your source for information on computer-related products and services. Reprinted with permission.
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