Recognizing the growing push for corporate workers to access company portals
from handheld devices while traveling to remote destinations, Business
Objects Tuesday launched the new version of the company’s mobile business
intelligence (BI) portal.
InfoView Mobile 4.0 lets workers to access key corporate information from
their personal digital assistants or Web-enabled cell phones, and view data
in several formats including color and charts.
Business Objects said the release is the continuation of a strategy the
company created in March 2000, when it launched the first version of its
wireless business intelligence portal. As many portals are, the information
is personalized to ensure that only the relevant data is displayed and users
do not waste time scrolling through irrelevant information.
4.0, the new version, extends support for PDA users by enabling customers to
download WebIntelligence reports onto PDAs via
synchronization and then view these reports in an offline mode. For example,
a sales manager could get an update on sales of top customers while in the
subway or on a plane. The product name has changed from BusinessObjects
InfoView Wireless
Edition to BusinessObjects InfoView Mobile to reflect these new product
features.
Business Objects said a major selling point of the new portal is InfoView
Mobile delivers more capabilities to mobile devices. Version 4.0 is tailored
for PDAs, meaning tables are displayed properly and charts can be resized to
fit
the screen dimensions of the output device. Also, users can navigate reports
to look at the data from a different view or drill into underlying details.
The portal also features a report synchronization feature, from which users
may access corporate and personal reports that have been downloaded from the
WebIntelligence server. For instance, a sales executive could download
performance indicator reports for each region under his responsibility and
could drill into each region to view sales by individual account.
Users can also access their information in online mode, where they would run
a report on the server, send the report to the PDA, and view the report on
the PDA while connected.
Gene Villeneuve, director of portal and mobile product marketing at Business
Objects, said the company made the necessary adjustment when it realized
customers are extending access to information beyond personal computers to
mobile devices.
InfoView Mobile has been tested, too, by optical networking giant Nortel
Networks and major mobile players such as Palm Inc.
Marina Levinson, vice president and chief information officer at Palm, said:
“Palm is committed to helping Palm economy players like Business Objects
extend Mobile business intelligence solutions while enabling fast ROI to
companies investing in
Mobile technology on the Palm platform.”
BusinessObjects InfoView Mobile 4.0 has completed beta and will be generally
available at the end of this month. InfoView Mobile 4.0 runs on both NT and
UNIX platforms and runs on any Palm OS PDA including Palm Pilot, IBM
Workpad, HandSpring Visor, and Prism, as well as Windows CE-driven PDAs
including Compaq iPAQ and HP Jordana. InfoView Mobile 4.0 also has added
support for the Pocket IE HTML browser, Handspring’s Blazer HTML browser,
and Pocket PC devices.
