Five Features of a Successful Enterprise Mobile App

Mobility, in conjunction with unified communications and collaboration (UC&C), has swept through the enterprise, making users more productive and accessible. Integrating those two capabilities holds the promise of even greater returns on those technology investments. However, for any technology initiative to be truly considered successful, users have to adopt and utilize its capabilities. With regard to mobile applications, we now have a good base of knowledge regarding what it takes to make this happen.

1. Appropriate Functionality: The first key to a successful mobile app is to "do a few things well." Many early attempts in the mobile space failed because developers tried to translate the entire desktop experience onto a mobile platform with the result that doing simple things became too difficult. The key is to recognize those things the user will need to do while mobile and focus on doing them flawlessly.

2. Intuitive Design: Going hand in hand with that is delivering a compelling user experience.

Whether it's making a call, setting up a video or joining a conference, a mobile app needs to engage the user. Users' expectations have been set by their experience with the consumer apps they use every day. People have enough to think about when they are on the go, so a mobile app needs to be an aid rather than a burden. Presence is a good example. Many people forget to set their presence status even when they are in the office, so the UC&C platform sets it for them using their calendar entries or the on-off hook status of their phone.

A mobile UC&C app should make use of the user's location information and use it to determine their status. It could also do things like interpret what communications capabilities that user has available. By looking at Wi-Fi or even Bluetooth associations along with GPS location, that location information can be even more granular in identifying locations like "Chicago or Paris Office" or "At my desk." Users may want control over who gets to see that more detailed location information, so the app will need the ability to support "set it and forget it."

3. Security: Organizations are waking up to the fact that enormous amounts of sensitive corporate information is now residing on mobile devices, thousands of which are lost or stolen every day. While there are tools available to ensure that information is encrypted and can be wiped remotely, it is also important that users' real time communications be secured as well. That is particularly true if the user is communicating through a public Wi-Fi network that lacks over-the-air encryption or other security measures. That security should extend to both the signaling and the media, and should be on by default. While some settings should be user controlled, when it comes to security, we can't depend on users knowing which networks are secure and which aren't, so it will be up to the app to ensure the required level of security.

4. BYOD Ready: The vast majority of organizations either have or are planning to implement bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives, so any mobile UC&C app we are looking to deploy must recognize that reality. Probably the biggest challenge will be onboarding new users. With the current demands on IT, we can't have an onboarding process that requires IT involvement. The process for downloading, installing, setting up and authenticating must be entirely self-service. Users are already going through these steps for their personal apps, so IT has to ensure that the process is straight forward, the user will have the information they need to associate with the UC&C platform and that they can get up and running with a minimum of effort.

5. Multi-Platform: If there is anything that we have learned from the mobile revolution it's that users demand choice. Whether it's the choice of the operating system, the screen size (i.e. smartphone, phablet or tablet), or how the icons are arranged on the screen, everyone expects to be able to choose and configure things to their personal preferences. IT must determine which are the most popular mobile platforms in use, particularly when they are BYOD, and ensure that their chosen solution works on all of them. No one foresees a day when any single platform will have 100% market share, so meeting the widest range of user choices will be key to success.

UC&C has provided an exciting array of new communications and collaboration capabilities, and mobility will allow them to go anywhere making users accessible and productive. The key measure of success however will be the extent to which users embrace and employ them. The combination of the apps driven world in the consumer space with the influx of new millennium workers is causing people to expect the same applications-based experience at work. IT departments must respond to this changing environment and seek out solutions that incorporate the characteristics of immediacy, integration and collaboration in a mobile UC platform.

This paper is sponsored by Mitel.