Research In Motion's (RIM) seventh annual Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES) is officially over, but I can't stop thinking about some of the innovative new products I saw on display in the event's Solutions Showcase. Five products in particular caught my attention, including new enhancements to a BlackBerry-based mobile workforce monitoring product; a service that pushes various media content to corporate handhelds, an uber RSS reader and all-around mobile companion; a BlackBerry virtualization key; and a cool app and electronic pen combo that captures handwriting and lets you search that text via BlackBerry.
Here's a look at my favorite five products and service from WES:
TeleNav Track, a cell phone-based GPS tracking service, helps manage mobile workers. In addition to its monitoring functionality, the application also offers audible and visual, turn-by-turn driving directions, electronic time-sheet reporting, bar-code scanning, jobs alert and change capability, electronic forms and progress reports, all optimized for the BlackBerry display.
I reviewed TeleNav Track last spring and was impressed with the application overall. In particular, I really liked the customizable Web-based dashboard that provides administrators with various tracking information like time-card records, locations, speeds of travel and job progress reports. With a single glance, admins can use the product to see where workers are, where they’ve been and whether they’re on schedule. “Geofences” let administrators know when employees enter or exit specific locations. And they can communicate with users via TeleNav’s text-message service or e-mail.
Or course, I'd already seen TeleNav Track in action, but the attention the product was getting from users really reminded me what a valuable application it truly is. And the company is about to add a new set of features, making a great service even more valuable. The new functionality, expected to be released at the end of May, includes team timecard reporting, distress alerts, remote signature capture capability and a job assignment accept/reject option.
The Mobile chalkboard from Chalk Media is an application suite that lets corporations and organizations quickly create and distribute media-rich "pushcasts," to staffers' or customers' BlackBerry devices. Such pushcasts can include PowerPoint slides, surveys, call or e-mail requests, video and more. Media chalkboard also enables IT administrators to secure and track the delivery of content. And Chalk's pushcasts are accessible without wireless connectivity, because they're pushed onto users' devices whenever there's network coverage and stored until the content is needed.
When I spoke with Jeff McDowell, RIM VP of global alliances, at WES about the future of mobile enterprise applications, he cited the Mobile chalkboard app as a good example of how more and more future business applications will take advantage of BlackBerry smartphones' media functionality. As an example of how the Mobile chalkboard can be put to use in an enterprise environment, McDowell described how a Chalk customer used the application to create and push short training videos to users on how to operate new photocopiers that had been deployed.
The newest edition of Mobile chalkboard, version 5.0, is currently available, and more information about Chalk Media and the product can be found on the company's website.
I've written about Viigo frequently on CIO.com, and I was pleased to see the company showing off its wares at WES. In fact, all WES
