Why skinny content will make you outsource

By Julie Bort
Network World, 09/11/00

The dirty details of the Wireless Markup Language (WML), the Wireless Access Protocol's (WAP) mark-up language, are best left to the development side of the house. As the lord of infrastructure, your main concern is the issue of transcoding, or converting from HTML to WML. That task is the prime reason to consider outsourcing your WAP infrastructure, at least at first.

Right now, there's no great way to automate transcoding, developers say, although the first set of tools that promise to do this are emerging. These include IBM's WebSphere Commerce Suite, Marketplace Edition; and NetMorf's SiteMorfer Application Server and SiteMorfer Device Server.

Because transcoding isn't a simple matter of swapping tags, automated transcoding is a lot like automated language translation. Both usually produce nonsense. The content needs to change when switching from a PC client to a cell phone or PDA.

"WML addresses some of the problems of soft keys and a lack of a point-and-click interface," says Don Schuerholtz, manager of developer technical marketing for Phone.com, a cell phone browser maker in Redwood City, Calif., that Software.com acquired in August. "It's a new user interface layer. If you try to take your entire mass of existing Web content and port it to the phone, it won't work. In most cases, it's a minimal subset of information that the mobile environment needs."

Which means developers should tailor information for each device's capabilities (screen size, support for color, placement of buttons and so on), and also content. Your salespeople may need client contact information and price lists, but your raw materials purchasing folks want warehouse information and new orders.

All of which makes WML a maintenance pig. There's little availability of skilled WAP labor. So give yourself a break and outsource your WAP infrastructure, advises Darryl Sterling, senior analyst for Mainspring Communications, a market research firm in Cambridge, Mass.

Users say the topper in favor of outsourcing is speed to market. When Memorex Telex Ireland introduced a WAP-based electronic customer relationship management (CRM) application, implementation took a stunning five days. Its service provider, Esat Digifone, hosts the gateway. The electronic CRM application, made by eWare, transcodes the data kept in the central CRM system.

"Develop partnerships with companies you trust and that are going to make it easy for you. If they are telling you that the implementation is going to take weeks or months, forget it. They don't have a solution and are using you as a guinea pig," says Rory Harte, technical project leader at Memorex.

There are other things you need to know about WML. For one, it's not the only choice. There's cHTML, a subset of HTML, used by Japan's NTT DoCoMo I-Mode service. Phone.com had its proprietary language, HDML, and then there is WML's brother, XHTML. The service provider determines the markup. So verify the provider you want supports WML before investing in that WAP gateway, particularly if you need to support roving users in Asia.

In the U.S. and Europe, WAP is the de facto standard. Despite all the bother, if you still need to run your own wireless infrastructure, you'll need to find a service provider willing to support that. Most will want you to use their WAP gateways.

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