17 May 2010, Posted by mikefoong in the category, 0 Comments

The iPAD 3G Experience Part 2: #iPad4ADay

In a true geek fashion, I experimented on living on a full iPad diet.The goal is to conclusively determine if it can be a laptop replacement for a large multi-national company like mine. So like all architects, we develop a methodology to test and the components that is fundamental for any mobile employee.

Methodology
In most corporation, depending on how paranoid your IT department is and corporate IT policies, when you introduce a new device into the environment, you need to set up the device (usually a personal computer) to what the call the Corporate Operating Environment (CoE) to lock down the computer and most importantly to setup the necessary access and install the essential software. If you are in IT, this is usually a job of the architecture department.

In this case, we will allow sometime to setup the iPad using another laptop before starting the experiment. The experiment starts when the iPad has the necessary to access the corporate intranet or the employee portal via a network connection. We need the other laptop to retrieve the WEP key or WiFi password for a temporary access to the network for this experiment. These days with the corporate applications being web based, all we really need is getting on to the network and using the browser to get access to the corporate intranet.

Other things we needed to setup is to access the corporate email, calendar and people directory (LDAP) Again this varies from company to company. Some company’s IT policy allows you to connect using IMAP within or outside the corporate intranet. Some don’t. If your company employs the Microsoft Exchange server, it would be the easiest and most compatible email, calendar and contact sync with your iPad. It also supports push email if your company implemented push email. In my case I have set up IMAP and do a 3 way calendar sync between Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar via Google Calendar Sync and the iPad. I have already set this up with my iPhone so it’s not hard configuring my iPad to sync with calendar. Alternatively, if your company runs an iCal server then it would work seamlessly as well.

Here we hit out first snag. I released that without turning on my computer, I will not be able to to sync my calendar over the air or have any push notification. Although, my company provides an alternative. I will detail it at the collaboration:calendar section.

Then allow some gloating time before starting the experiment and during the experiment. As the most talked about device, the experiment will be disrupted by curious by standers, walker bys and colleagues who will stop you to enquire and ogle at the iPad. Usually you get quite passionate about the device right about now.

So the experiment begins with first we all do when we reach the office. We Twitter! Not! We clear our emails.

1. Communications
1.1 Emails
In the setup part, we setup the iPad to access the corporate email and it was a breeze to get it up and running after it was configured.

Reading and Responding
Works like any email client and reading it on the iPad is a very enjoyable experience. I quickly realized that you can get engrossed in the task that you are doing. Mainly because I am have been brained washed and accustomed to the iPhone OS. (Read more on the Task Switching/Multi-Task Switching here)

The iPad is a great device for responding to current emails quickly. That is if you keep your emails up to date and have zero inbox everyday. I use the trusted trio concept and with the iPad it allows me to quickly respond to the emails I have answers to and archive it. The challenge is in those emails that you need some time to answer or has a reference to other emails or documents.

Email management is not the iPad’s key strength. I have lots of emails managed in 3 main folders. Looking for other emails to be included/forwarded is an issue. Furthermore you only can keep 200 emails in your iPad the rest have to be in the server. if you do not
delete emails like me, then the corporate email quota would then be a problem for you. Hence, I am only able to read and respond to current emails and not do much more after that.

Attachments
Most of the time, you will email zipped or compressed attachments. Initially, this was a problem with the standard email client that came with the iPad. It took me sometime to find an app that could be compatible with Microsoft Office Documents, iWork and able to handle zip files. Somewhat of a File Manager for iPad.

If you are planning to work on documents and need a way to handle compress files. Good Reader is the best app around. It could uncompress zip files and preview Microsoft Office and iWorks Documents. It also supports Google Docs and Dropbox. You can download files from those sites directly into GoodReader. It’s the Swiss Army knife for file management. The review of this app will be another blog post.

1.2 Corporate IM
Most corporate implement their own Instant Messaging services for internal communications. Since Jabber is one of the most popular open source Instant Messenger platform, it is widely adopted in most organizations. For me, it is a very important communication tool to
communicate with my colleagues around the world.

There are a few apps on the app store that will support Jabber. I bought IM+ since i had the iPhone 3G and since IM+ is released as a iPhone and iPad app, i don’t need to buy it again and it worked perfectly. That is as long as you have your corporate jabber server IP
address and configuration. Otherwise setting up the Corporate IM was a breeze.

Since IM+ has a notification server that is outside the corporate firewall, notifications do not work. This might somewhat be defeating the purpose of having an instant messenger. Alternatively, some of us use Google Talk to communicate. But it is frown upon by the Corporate IT policy.

2. Access
2.1 Virtual Private Networks
Virtual Private Networks are an essential part of an mobile employee. This allow us to connect to the corporate intranet through the internet cloud. The iPhone/iPad OS supports L2TP, PPTP and Cisco IPSec.

As long as you have the configuration at hand, setup is a breeze. Connecting to the VPN is also a breeze. Just go to settings and flick the VPN setting to ON and it will connect automatically. This is particularly helpful for when I am out of the office and i need to get some information or to clock time from where I am, like a cafe.

2.2 Employee Portal or Corporate Intranet
If your corporate provides a web based employee portal and does not run flash, then most of the functions would work, unless the portal is not compatible with Mobile Safari.

Where I work, file sharing is through a web document management site, entirely web based. Getting to those files is not a problem. Downloading them is. So you will not be able to download any files from a shared document management server, there is no shared drive
that you can access and you can FTP (File Transfer Protocol) any file from a FTP server. The only option right now is either use a MobileMe, Google Docs, Dropbox or Box.net. This means you have to transfer your file using another laptop before you can use the files inthe shared location.

Other than file sharing, 90% of the intranet/employee portal is accessible through the web. Only caveat is, it does not support JAVA, ActiveX or JavaScript that is not compatible with Mobile Safari.

3. Tasks
3.1. Reviewing documents
One of my most common task is to review and approve solution designs, requirements traceability, scope, project plan and resourcing. This usually involves Microsoft Powerpoint, Word, Excel and Project Documents. The first step is to convert project documents to PDF, the rest i can import into iWorks. Just as a comparison, I bought another app to compare how iWorks and an 3rd Party Independent App handle the Microsoft Office Documents.

As a solution reviewer, and working on the iPad, i merely need to update an excel spreadsheet with my comments and recommendations. The conversion of the Excel spreadsheet is not entirely perfect, it’s viewable but editing the document takes a little more.

I am also not able to annotate and insert my comments into the document as it is not compatible with Microsoft’s Review functionality.

3.2. Creating Presentations, Documentation and Diagraming
My other task is to create solution architecture for my clients. This part is easier, as I can create from scratch the documents required for a complete architecture. Creating the documentation, the powerpoint diagram is pretty simple and has no problem with the standard diagrams. You can use iWork to create Microsoft Powerpoint presentations, Microsoft Word Document and Microsoft Excel Documents. At the time of the writting, Apple just released an update where you can export from iWork directly to Microsoft Office Documents.

When it comes to standard notations like UML, Flowcharts, other architectural icons that comes with Microsoft Visio, there is just no alternative on the iPad. So either i make them up entirely from scratch and create a template for future documents or use Microsoft Visio.

Conclusion
I find that organizations are too entrenched into the Microsoft Ecosystem, with Windows and Office Productivity Suite. We can strut along to be the exception to the norm, but in the context of intra office collaboration, apple still have a big challenge ahead of them. To change a large organization as large as the one I work for is going to be very very hard and for a good few months depending on the size of your company, before it can become productive, even if that is the case, my customers operating environment is likely to be Microsoft and you still need to cater to their needs.

Although I am not surprised by the dominance of Microsoft in this area, they are still not doing anything to counter the onslaught of these devices like the iPad. It might not make much of a dent right now but like the fall of Internet Explorer, this leaves us something to hope for.

At this point in time, as a mobile worker it cannot replace the presence of another laptop in a large organization. Smaller ones should not be an issue. As a computing device for my other passion, it definitely is my main computing device and am loving it. That is detailed in part 3 of this series.

A note about Task Switching and Multi-Task Switching
It is a little more hassle to switch from one app to another on the iPhone/iPad. So i tend to be very focus on completing my task before moving on to another task/app and get less distracted by twitter and other web site I have opened. We have read in many blog posts and research that single tasking is more efficient than multi-tasking. However if you are more disciplined than i am, and you are used to the full blown OS multi-task/application switching capabilities, it would more efficient on a standard laptop.