How to make your business mobile

If someone came up to you and offered you a no-catch way of making your sales team work harder and more efficiently for a one-off investment of £75, what would you say?The chances are you would bite their arm off.

Want to know how to do it? The answer is actually more straightforward than you think: you simply buy and plug in GPRS PC card/modem to each of your company laptops and connect them to the internet. Your sales team gets to access their email, and can use the web anywhere. And your company saves time and money.

This is just one of the examples of how the mobile market has finally caught up with the needs of businesses like yours in the last year.

Now you can buy products that plug into your business and make your working life easier. There will be no need for massive investment or any disruption to your business.

While previously the advantages of going mobile were marginal and easily ignored it is a different story now. The benefits are compelling and with a minimal amount of fuss and investment you can make your company more efficient, more hard working and more competitive. These are benefits no growing business can afford to ignore.

CHOOSE WHAT YOU NEED

So how do you take advantage of the world of mobile devices? The first thing to do for any company planning to give its workers mobile access is to identify its needs and work out what the benefits would be to the business.

In practice, that means following a few easy steps: First you need to decide what kind of mobility you want for your business. Ask yourself where and how will staff need to access information? Next question you should think about is who needs to go mobile? Go through which staff and groups of workers would become more efficient by having access to the office on the move. Then work out what their needs are. Is it just a need to send and receive haves’ – will give you a much clearer idea about how far up the ladder you want to go in terms of functionality and price.

All of this will help you decide what kind of kit you need to buy – and the chances are that most businesses will not have to buy much new kit at all. As the list below shows, if your needs are simple, you can probably get away with upgrading your mobile phones and buying a few special cards for your PC.

Although more complex solutions, such as the ability to access your office network, will require more investment and more kit, don’t be fooled into thinking that because you are going mobile you should be spending a lot of money. Many companies, like Dell and O2 with their mobile office product listed below, sell off-the-shelf starter packs which will get you on the move for an upfront investment of £285 and an ongoing cost of around £20 per person per month.

When you are thinking about cost, it is vital to balance this against the value of the savings in efficiency you are making. If you can get an extra hour a day out of each salesperson you can then work out how much its worth to the business. This will keep it within the cost equation when you decide how much to invest. To buy your services and equipment, your first stop should be your mobile phone company. All of the key business players – particularly Orange and T-mobile - have developed mobile services which you can get by adding on to your current contract. Larger users with 50 or more phones will get better deals.

If you have a more complex need or are thinking of investing in laptops or PDAs as a business then you should buy direct from the likes of HP or Dell and get advice from their sales people.

The last issue to bear in mind with any migration to mobile working is the security angle. One recent survey by Pointsec Mobile Technologies found that, while 41% of PDA users access their corporate network, a quarter of Growing 68 Business September 2003 them bypass the password function and 57% of PDA users don’t encrypt the data held on them. These are serious risks to manage for any business and you must plan accordingly.

Mobile devices like laptops and PDAs will have access to diaries, your emails, contact details and in some instances your company network so you will need to adopt a usage policy which maximises security. That means using all of the access password and data encryption facilities which are built into the device as well as possibly bolstering this with third party control and security software.

Eight ways to do what you need to do on the move

1 GET EMAIL WHEN YOU ARE OUT OF THE OFFICE: BUY A BLACKBERRY

The most straightforward off-the-shelf solution for getting email from your office network with one device is to invest in a Blackberry. These gadgets are a hybrid between a phone and a PDA, so you can make calls, receive emails and use the mini-keyboard to type out replies. The Blackberry has an always-on GPRS connection which it uses to check your email accounts every four or five minutes. When it collects a new mail it vibrates and lights-up to tell you. The main drawback is that, although you can receive Word, Excel and PDF files, they are stripped of most formatting and cannot be edited.

The model to look at is the 7230 which comes as part of a new service from T-Mobile, aimed at non-corporate companies. That means there is no need for additional software or complex reconfiguration of your network and you don’t have to buy handsets in volume.

To connect you will need to obtain a data-only account with T-Mobile which costs £3.50 per month plus £10 per month for the data services package. That gives you unlimited Instant Email and the first 100 megabytes of internet access, equivalent to 2,500 internet pages. Extra data usage is charged at £7.50 per megabyte (MB). The same service is due soon on Vodafone and O2.

2 GET YOUR EMAIL AND WORK ON THE MOVE TOO: BUY A PDA

The more sophisticated option for working on the move is the PDA. If you need to receive, edit and send documents while you are out of the office then this is the device you need to invest in.

PDAs are ultra-portable pocket PCs which give you nearly all of the functionality you would expect from your desktop PC with mini versions of the main applications you use in the office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Internet Explorer. This means you can receive and edit documents for these applications.

When it comes to getting your email on the move with a PDA you have two options. The first is to pick a combined phone and pocket PC. The second option is to use a PDA in conjunction with a GPRS mobile phone. Both of these options allow you to pick up email from your office with attachments with minimal configuration of your IT system.

If you want a fully supported service for specific teams in your company, then Outlook Anywhere may be the solution you need. This is a joint service from Vodafone, Microsoft and HP. Rather than buying direct or through a mobile phone shop, you consult with a reseller about your needs. They will then come in and set up the system for you. To use the service you will have to switch your mobile accounts over to Vodafone and you will probably have to swap your handsets. You will also have a server installed on your network, which will manage the email for you.

3 FOR INTERNET AND EMAIL UPGRADE YOUR LAPTOPS WITH A GPRS CARD

Splashing out on pocketfuls of new gadgets isn’t the only way to get your email on the move. If you are happy to rely on a laptop then the smartest and quickest way is to simply upgrade your existing model with a GPRS PC Card modem. These are small cards, which fit in the ports on the side of your laptop, containing a modem and SIM card connecting you to the internet via the mobile phone network.

4 OR JUST USE YOUR LAPTOP AND MOBILE PHONE

In the old days if you wanted to connect to the internet using a mobile and a laptop you either had to link the two with a cable or use an infrared link. Now the most convenient connection of choice comes via Bluetooth. Most of the new generation of company mobile phones are Bluetooth enabled. That means you only need to buy a Bluetooth card for your PC or PDA to allow it to connect to the internet via your mobile phone. Bluetooth isn’t just about internet connections though, it allows data to be sent to any enabled devices such as a printer, PC, mobile or PDA which helps you to keep all the data on your laptop and your desktop synchronised.

5 GET ACCESS TO YOUR NETWORK ANYWHERE IN YOUR OFFICE

There’s no reason why you can’t make working in your office easier by creating wireless hotspots in meeting rooms or even on the factory floor.

That way you can get at your network from a PDA or laptop and access or input data whenever you need it.

Setting this up is very straightforward. You just need to buy access points and WiFi cards. The access points are devices that use the same plug as your PC to connect to your network. The WiFi cards also provide the wireless connection to any enabled device within a given radius.

Depending on where you decide to put the wireless transmitter, this simple upgrade will let you access any files you need in your boardrooms or in your meeting rooms. T

here is a limit to the number of people who can work from each connection. So if you want to add more users you will need to add access points to maintain connection speeds. Growing 72 Business September 2003

6 AND GET ACCESS TO YOUR OFFICE NETWORK ANYWHERE

Being able to gain access to your entire office network is the most powerful tool you can have. If you are on the move there is no need to go into the office to update spreadsheets, sales databases or customer accounts; you have all your resources at your fingertips. Orange, T-mobile and O2 all offer two types of service which let you connect to your network.

For small groups of people, such as the senior management team, your best bet is to choose an off-the-shelf solution that connects your laptop to your network through a GPRS connection. This then connects to the company network via its existing internet connection. To get this service you will normally buy a group of products: a GPRS mobile or data card, airtime contracts and software for your server. You then pay for the amount of data transferred on a monthly basis. It is normally down to your IT manager to set the system up.

7 MAKE THE MOST OF INTERNET HOTSPOTS ON THE MOVE WITH A WIFI CARD

If you are sick of lugging around a laptop for your sales presentations then you can make life easier and give your back a break by using a PDA and a miniprojector. The Margi Presenter-To-Go (www.margi.com) is specially designed to allow presentations to be made using PowerPoint on a PDA by connecting to a projector with a special card. The other option is to get a WiFi card (see above). Increasingly projectors have WiFi access built in which lets you communicate with handhelds or laptops during presentations. It saves the bother of fiddling around with wires under the table, although not every office will have one. Margi Presenter-to-go CF Card: £158 each GBrecommends Whether you have a PDA or a laptop, WiFi is your other option for you to get to your email via the internet when you are out and about.

To do this you’ll need to buy a WiFi card, which constantly scans for any wireless networks in range. So with a WiFi-enabled device you can connect whenever you find yourself in a wireless hotspot – a zone where there is a wireless connection to the internet. You will find wireless hotspots increasingly in airport lounges, hotels and coffee shops. In the early days they were free, but now you have to pay for this access.

The market leader in terms of the number of hotspots it has and access speeds is BT Openzone (check where you can find them at www.btopenzone. com). Its locations are marked with the BT Openzone logo but access doesn’t come cheap: ad hoc browsing costs anything from £10 for two hours access to £85 each month for unlimited access. However there are plenty of other options available with T-Mobile also making inroads on the market (see www.t-mobile.co.uk/hotspot for more details) on where you can browse.

8 USE A PDA FOR PORTABLE PRESENTATIONS

If you are sick of lugging around a laptop for your sales presentations then you can make life easier and give your back a break by using a PDA and a miniprojector. The Margi Presenter-To-Go (www.margi.com) is specially designed to allow presentations to be made using PowerPoint on a PDA by connecting to a projector with a special card. The other option is to get a WiFi card (see above). Increasingly projectors have WiFi access built in which lets you communicate with handhelds or laptops during presentations. It saves the bother of fiddling around with wires under the table, although not every office will have one.

9 THINK CAREFULLY: PDA OR LAPTOP?

If you want to maximise the productivity of your people on the move, don’t assume that everyone in your company needs a laptop. Buying PDA’s instead of laptops will mean you can make more people more productive.

The main point to bear in mind is what your employees will use the device for. If it is note-taking, presentations to individuals and email then a PDA is the answer. If you need more sophisticated functionality and use of the internet then it will be a laptop. PDA’s aren’t good for browsing the web because there are still very few sites which are designed with them in mind. Their screens and keyboards are also too small for long periods of work.

ARE 3G PHONES WORTH THE BOTHER?

The new generation of 3G mobile phones offers one of the fastest ways of getting data on the move and can deliver speeds of up to 2MB per second. That’s the theory. But when you cut through the hype punted out by the mobile phone operaters and get down to the reality of working on the move it’s not quite like that. In fact you have to be stationary to get anywhere near the sorts of speeds they promise. And if you are moving, connection speeds drop significantly. The only operator offering 3G in the UK is “3”and coverage in the UK is limited to urban areas. Go outside the 3G network area and the connection speed is painfully slow. The standard cost of sending and receiving emails depends on message size ranging from five pence to 25p a time. Although costs fall when you subscribe to a monthly tariff. “3” does not currently offer general web access on its 3G network
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