NetSuite makes hosted apps available via iPhone
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InfoWorld - NetSuite&#39;s users can start accessing the company&#39;s hosted midmarket applications suite via their iPhones as businesses start to investigate the possibilities of using the&#160;much hyped Apple mobile device&#160;at work.
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In an apparent about-face, Apple Inc. will allow third-party applications to work directly on the iPhone, Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in a posting on the company's Web site Wednesday.
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iPhone Software Update 1.1.3, a free software update available today via iTunes 7.5 or later, brings significant new features to iPhone. After installing the update, iPhone customers will be able to automatically find their location using the redesigned Maps application; text message multiple people in one message; create Web Clips for their favorite websites; customize their home screen; and watch movies rented from the new iTunes Movie Rentals right on their iPhone.
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When Apple's iPhone went on sale late last month, there were no doubt more than a few CEO or C-level execs in line. Now they want their new toy to work with their corporate network. What's a sysadmin to do? Seth Weintraub offers some ideas.
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Fidelity Investments is gearing up to make its mobile applications available on the iPhone as part of an effort to keep up with the likes of Amazon.com and eBay on support for handhelds.
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Google is releasing a new edition of its hosted applications suite that end-users can bring into the workplace without the involvement of their IT department.It means that IT managers who fret about employees using unauthorized software at work will have another tool to worry about, especially in industries where information management is heavily regulated, like health care and finance.The new release, called Google Apps Team Edition, is due to be available Thursday for free. It is aimed at employees who are interested in using Google Apps but whose employers haven&#39;t signed up for it, said Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager.Team Edition contains the core communication and collaboration services and applications from other editions, like the word processor, spreadsheet, Start page, Talk instant messaging, and calendar, but not Gmail, which requires IT participation to re-route the company&#39;s e-mail flow.So far, more than 500,000 mostly small organizations have signed up for Google Apps, but the other versions -- Standard, Education, Partner, and Premier -- require IT to implement the suite because its services are linked to an organization&#39;s Internet domain.That changes with the Team Edition, which will let employees set up Google Apps workgroups as long as they have valid e-mail addresses with their organizations&#39; domains, Sheth said.&quot;Google Apps has been, by definition, an IT project, and now we want to let people use it without IT involvement,&quot; Sheth said.Once signed up with Team Edition, people can see who else in their organization&#39;s Internet domain is also a user, and invite those who aren&#39;t, Sheth said.&quot;It provides a quick way for workgroups to start collaborating,&quot; he said.IT departments shouldn&#39;t get angry about Team Edition, according to Sheth, because, unlike other software that employees use without IT approval, it provides an upgrade path to IT-manageable versions.&quot;The IT department always has the option to sign up for the Standard Edition for free if they want to provide control over this,&quot; Sheth said. &quot;This is a solid, happy medium.&quot;Team Edition can also be upgraded to the other editions, like Education, which is free, and Premier, which costs $50 per user per year. Although Gmail isn&#39;t part of Team Edition, Google is exploring ways to make it a part, Sheth said.By its very nature as a Web-hosted software suite, an unmanaged Google Apps deployment can represent a concern for IT departments, since the applications and the data generated are stored outside organizations&#39; firewalls in Google data centers.However, Team Edition will be far from alone among the hosted software that employees use in their organizations without getting approval from the IT department, said Erica Driver, a Forrester Research analyst.The IT department reactions to Team Edition will depend on the organization&#39;s culture, which range from those in &quot;lockdown mode&quot; to those more tolerant and aware that Web 2.0 technologies are seeping in from the consumer world to the workplace, Driver said.Team Edition, with its bottom-up, end-user-driven focus, fits in with Google&#39;s traditional strategy of appealing to individuals, grown out of its consumer services, and will likely boost the adoption of Google Apps in companies, government agencies, educational institutions and other organizations that don&#39;t currently use the suite, said Matt Cain, a Gartner analyst.&quot;The Google model is to prime the well at the end-user level and assist IT somewhere along the way, but the demand generation for the suite will definitely be at the rank-and-file level, not at the IT level,&quot; Cain said.Google needs to make sure it strikes a balance between rallying end-users and giving IT managers a way to enter the picture and exert control, he said. &quot;Google will encourage end-user adoption but it can&#39;t disintermediate the IT staff, which will have to ultimately clean up any mess that&#39;s created,&quot; Cain said.
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News that Apple is open to third-party iPhone apps has software developers salivating.
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When it releases the iPhone software development kit later this month, Apple will likely use iTunes as the means of distributing third-party software. That has programmers excited, because of iTunes' massive audience -- but also nervous about the amount of control Apple will have.
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NetSuite has updated the e-commerce piece of its NetSuite hosted application suite, allowing users to manage sales efforts on eBay Inc.'s action site
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InfoWorld - SaaS (software as a service) platform vendor NetSuiteÂ has released SuiteBundler, a tool its partner ISVs and VARs can use to create reusable applications for verticals.
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Apple has released an update for iTunes to let iPhone users activate and sync their phones.
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Look, ma, no PC/Mac iPhone hackers have released a tool that allows owners of firmware 1.1.1 iPhones and iPod Touches to open up their devices to third-party apps - all without the need for a host Mac or PC.â¦
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Apple updated iTunes to keep users from creating free iPhone ringtones--a workaround has already been posted.
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Apple on Wednesday confirmed rumors that it will release a mobile software development kit (SDK) for developers in February so that third parties can create applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch.&quot;We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers&#39; hands in February,&quot; according to a post attributed to Apple CEO Steve Jobs on the company&#39;s Web site.The news should placate irked mobile developers who have already been busy building applications for the iPhone without Apple&#39;s approval. Tech-savvy users have been able to customize their phones with new software, at least until Apple put the kibosh on this activity with an iPhone update in September that erased all unauthorized applications from the device. The company did, however, post a list of approved Web-based applications for the iPhone on its Web site last week to discourage users from hacking into the device to add new applications.It will take Apple until February to come out with an SDK because the company is trying to&#160;create an open platform&#160;so developers can write applications accessing the most advanced iPhone features, as well as a secure environment that isn&#39;t prone to viruses, worms, or other&#160;security threats, Jobs wrote.&quot;This is no easy task,&quot; he wrote. &quot;Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones -- this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous.&quot;Jobs noted that other handset providers, such as Nokia, are not allowing applications to be loaded onto some of their new phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced to a legitimate developer.&quot;While this makes such a phone less than &quot;totally open,&quot; we believe it is a step in the right direction,&quot; he wrote.
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(InfoWorld) - One of the groups that claims it has developed an unlock hack for Apple's iPhone is now saying it will only offer the software to resellers, not to individuals, a popular technology blog reported Monday. According to an e-mail message sent to interested volume sellers -- and posted by Engadget Monday -- iPhoneSIMFree said it would not sell the unlock directly to iPhone owners. "iphonesimfree.com is a wholesale only company," read the e-mail. "Although we could, we do not and will not sell directly to end-users because we want to work together with our valuable resellers as a team and not interfere in their business." Late last month, iPhoneSIMFree said it had created software that would let iPhone owners make calls on mobile networks other than AT&T, the smart phone's official and exclusive carrier in the U.S. Unlocking the iPhone is contrary to Apple's intent; according to the company, iPhones must be activated only with AT&T, and buyers must subscribe to a two-year AT&T calling plan. Even so, Apple has made no public announcement about iPhoneSIMFree or any other of several unlocking schemes that have been publicized. iPhoneSIMFree's e-mail also outlined the unlock process and spelled out its pricing structure. The unlock requires that a file be installed on the iPhone and a connection made to the iPhoneSIMFree servers; the latter, said iPhoneSIMFree, links the specific iPhone to the unlock. Resellers will handle part of the process. Prices will range from $25 per unlock (in lots of 5,000 or more) to $36 (in lots of 50). The company, which has no mailing address, has kept its composition and the identity of its developers, under wraps. Its Web site, for example, uses an anonymity service to cloak the usual address, phone number, and contact person information searchable via WHOIS. iPhoneSIMFree also said it would not guarantee that the unlock would work in the future. "It does currently work on all firmware versions, up to and including, 1.02," said iPhoneSIMFree in the e-mail quoted by Engadget. "We will naturally try to provide our resellers an updated version of our software for each firmware update, it is in our interest, but we do NOT guarantee that we will be able to do so." Apple's iPhone updates have required users who installed hacks or work-arounds to restore their devices from scratch, which erased the modifications. The most recent update, 1.0.2, however, did not cripple most hacks as had the first firmware update. An Irish company that announced another unlock has been silent on the subject for a week. UniquePhones last mentioned its iPhone unlock on Aug. 28 when it posted video of an unlock in progress. Prior to that, UniquePhones had said it would start selling its unlock Aug. 25 but backed off after receiving a phone call it said came from a California law firm representing AT&T. Another unlock, a Czech product dubbed TurboSIM, is currently unavailable; its maker's Web ordering site had been inundated, and now sports messages such as "Sorry, temporarily closed" beside the unlock product. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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(InfoWorld) - If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, then Mohammed will come to the mountain, goes the saying. Now, the high-tech version of that saying might read: If the iPhone won't come to the enterprise, then enterprise will come to the iPhone. The announcement this week that NetSuite, a Web-based-only service provider for ERP and CRM to the midmarket, runs on the iPhone without any major tweaking almost as well it runs on a desktop has a lot of people rethinking the capability of the iPhone as a business tool. To make matters even more interesting, NetSuite didn't spend one day in Cupertino to figure out how SuitePhone, as it's now called, would run on Apple's new device, though the two companies worked together in the past to ensure that NetSuite's SaaS (software as a service) solution ran well on Apple's Safari desktop browser. "For the iPhone, we didn't have to do additional development work," says Malin Huffman, senior product manager at NetSuite. Whatever improvements were made to NetSuite 07 in order to work with the latest version of Safari for the desktop "carries over to Safari on the iPhone." While most mobile solutions are limited in what they can accomplish -- dialing directly from a contact manager is typical -- Huffman claims NetSuite customers already use the iPhone and the SuitePhone solution in the field to look up customer history, process credit cards, and even do payroll. So is this a unique circumstance due in large part to the way NetSuite was built originally? After all, it does not use Flash or need Java to run, making porting to the iPhone, which lacks support for both, that much easier. Huffman says no, the NetSuite build is not that unique for a SaaS application, but it may be too early to tell. While the iPhone famously does not support Flash or Java, it does support JavaScript and all the Web standards that AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is built on. Plus, it supports PDFs and Microsoft Word documents. "The AJAX technology allows [NetSuite] to work faster over the slower network than it would otherwise," notes Huffman. Also, because AJAX allows users to drag and drop from selected environments without having to refresh the entire contents of a page, the SuitePhone version makes for a more seamless experience.Â  Of course, there are a number of limitations, as InfoWorld pointed out in its review by Tom Yager. Yager notes that the device will not upload or download files. However, in a SaaS solution like NetSuite, this limitation may not be a deal breaker for purchasing the device. The strong suit of any SaaS solution is in accessing data directly from the server. Focusing on real-time instant access rather than offline access, says Huffman, is what its users care about the most.Â  But Yager also says, "Safari does not allow a Web page to sense finger motion using standard events, so drag, slide, and drag/drop operations require special effort." True, says Huffman. "You wouldn't want to do a lot of configuration of NetSuite on the iPhone. You would do the configuration on the desktop."Â  Safari also lacks the "ability to adjust a Web page's text size," notes Yager. It is a valid criticism, says Huffman, but it doesn't affect NetSuite because users can pinch or drill down. So have too many industry reviews underestimated the iPhone's usefulness in the enterprise? While the iPhone is not perfect, there is no denying that NetSuite ports to this handheld device easily. The apparent ease with which it does that comes from a very obvious but often overlooked fact: Apple has duplicated the Safari browser almost exactly as it exists on the desktop. If you can re-create a browser for a handheld that is almost identical to the desktop version, everything that can be done on the Web on the desktop can, in theory, be carried out on the handheld browser, too. Where Apple has gone the extra mile is in creating a user interface that makes up for many of the small-screen limitations: for example, the so-called two-finger pinch that allows a user to drill down and expand what they are looking at. Huffman adds that users also can customize their views to suit the small screen by setting up dashboards in a one-column format or creating forms that are better suited to the iPhone. There is nothing really new here other than a better-thought-out, user-friendly interface. But Apple took the obvious -- what others have tried -- and put all the pieces together in a single package. Some believe it is so unique that the device may become, in essence, a wake-up call to the entire high-tech industry, especially handset manufacturer designers and software developers.Â  And what that wake-up call from Apple and NetSuite says is that if you build it right, they, the enterprise, will come to the mountain, er, the handset manufacturer.
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After months of silence on the matter, Apple finally announced Wednesday that it plans to enable developers to create native third-party applications for the iPhone (not just Web-based applications), and will deliver an SDK in February. The delay has been blamed on security concerns.