Wireless data access requires practical planning

Television commercials make wireless access to data seem like magic. But you've got a lot of work ahead to make wireless pay off for your company.

Handheld computers, PDAs and even cell phones with Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) browsers give end users a simpler way to work with corporate data, compared with desktop and laptop Windows PCs. Wireless connections let a growing number of white collar and blue collar workers, whose jobs are not done at desks, access existing corporate applications almost anytime, from almost anywhere.

But the diversity of wireless nets, carriers, client devices, operating systems and presentation protocols creates a confusingly complex set of issues for corporate customers looking to open their resources to wireless users. Current wireless middleware typically synchronizes handhelds with corporate databases, or connect, for example, Palm OS PDAs to Microsoft Exchange Server or an order status application. Emerging products will let cell phones with tiny screens and a WAP browser access a subset of Web information.

The shift from specialized, focused wireless solutions to a broader architecture that can handle this wireless diversity can be seen in companies such as Northeast Utilities (NEU), in Berlin, Conn. Today, NEU wants to extend its Windows-oriented wireless infrastructure to deal with new devices that run different operating systems.

Four years ago, NEU wanted to push data and maps showing underground power lines and electric facilities out to a range of field-based workers, such as substation inspectors and "digsafe coordinators," says Andy Kasznay, an NEU software engineer. "We needed a scalable infrastructure to do this."

NEU eventually selected the SQL Anywhere Studio suite from Sybase subsidiary iAnywhere Solutions for storing and managing data on client devices and for synchronizing this data with corporate servers.

But NEU now is looking to reach other mobile devices, running operating systems other than Windows, with different screen sizes and formats. One of Kasznay's worries is that these will need a different infrastructure, or even separate ones. NEU is evaluating the iAnywhere Wireless Server, announced earlier this year, which is designed to link with corporate applications, and then synchronize data between these and client programs on an array of WAP-enabled devices, and Palm OS and Windows CE handhelds. The server also supports short text messaging via the Short Messaging Service protocol.

But users of these devices want access to the corporate crown jewels - enterprise applications and corporate databases. The demand for this access, coupled with the front-end complexity of nets and devices, determines the issues corporate IT needs to examine.

"Enterprises have major legacy investments, and a key question is how to integrate these with both wired and wireless Internets," says Phillip Redman, wireless research director at technology research company Gartner Group. "But they also have to ask, 'How do we move this data across many different types of wireless nets to many different devices?' Most enterprises don't have the capabilities for this."

But experts say you can start creating a foundation that will make it easier to deal with this diversity, and to wirelessly access applications through your corporate Web site.

The first issue is the Web site. "Businesses have invested huge sums of money to build online sites designed around PC systems," says Karl Garrison, wireless team leader, with Equient, a Fairfax, Va., consulting company specializing in content design and management for wireless access.

Most Web content today is downloaded in large chunks, such as Portable Definition Format files. "It's impractical on a Palm handheld to read a 10-page document," Garrison says. Instead, content needs to be "redefined," he says. Companies need to create short summaries of longer documents or indexes that will let users find and retrieve only the section they want.

The second issue to look at is how corporate customers build applications - the application architecture. On Web sites today, Garrison says, HTML formatting is often "mixed in" with the content in the form of Active Server Pages or Java Server Pages, which generate HTML pages that have data drawn from back-end databases. "This is a mess [for wireless deployment]," Garrison says.

Instead, what's needed is an overall framework that uses XML as a common way to format data, and the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) to create style sheets, which are a set of rules that determine how one format is converted to another. For example, different style sheets can convert the same Oracle data into a format for a Palm VII wireless PDA or a Nokia 7100 cell phone with its larger-than-usual screen for a WAP browser.

"Then, if you want to add a new device, or add VoiceXML, you just write another style sheet," Garrison says. "And that doesn't change the underlying application that much."

For big companies, creating this standards-based framework will be a big effort, and most are just starting to embrace XML and XSL. "One of our customers has IBM S/390 servers and millions of lines of Cobol code, serving data to 3270 terminals. None of that is anywhere close to XML," says Craig Shohara, director of engineering at Stellcom, a San Diego company that builds corporate wireless Web sites. "You need to re-architect the data stream, to insert something that understands what the data is and map it to XML."

Vendors are adopting this same framework in their wireless middleware products, which then form the basis of a service or are sold directly to corporate customers to create their own infrastructure.

AlterEgo Networks of Redwood City, Calif., this month released AlterEgo Designer, a graphical user interface-based development tool for creating XSL scripts, and Mobile Web Server, a set of server programs that reads the scripts and generates a format for a given wireless client. Mobile Web Server incorporates the Inktomi Traffic Server so generated pages can be cached for faster performance.

"Doing this kind of [conversion to different device formats] introduces latency into the net," says Richard Ling, AlterEgo CEO. "We compensate with caching and other technologies."

The third major issue to look at is how users interact with wireless devices. It's much harder to enter data with a handheld, and elaborate searches are much more complicated than they are using a desktop computer and Web browser. "Even logging on with a WAP phone is very painful," Garrison says. "You need minimalist user interfaces, and you want personalized sites for people to access the information they want very quickly."

Contact Senior Editor John Cox

Other recent articles by Cox

Research: Wireless
Primers, articles and more.

Sign up for the Wireless in the Enterprise newsletter.