Directions Diary - ISV Session - Handapps: Mobile Solutions

I know that Microsoft is coming with their Mobile platform for Dynamics, so I'm quite curious what Handapps has got to offer what Microsoft hasn't.

First some info bout GoIntegration.

• It's an ISV focused on mobile solutions. That's their focus.
• They also focus on Simplicity, Flexibility.
• Prooven with 100s of installations across multiple platforms, time zones and countries
• How does Handapps differentiate with other competing products:
  • The products are complete
    • Not an one-off, custom, undocumented application
    • Fully functional at installation
    • It is not a toolkit, template or app-skeleton that requires extensive programming
  • Integrated with NAV out-of-the box - and follows the
  • The solutions are customizable
    • One size does not fit all
    • To customer's needs.
  • The solutions is theirs, from ground up developed for NAV
  • The solutions provide recognizable functionality for the end-user

It's marketingfluff that I would like to see for real ... Demo time!

The presentor was showing us the customer application. How it was possible to search for a customer, get the info, go to list and card, add a comment to a customer, viewing its sales history, view the sales documents that have been created on the device (or add a new salesdoc yourself), ... .

First impression was that it was very user-friendly. Fact that PocketPC machines doesn't have much place on the screen was solved by sort of tooltips: touching the screen on certain fields shows more info about that field.

Also, when selecting an item, it's going to suggest the price. I don't know if it's the price calculation system from NAV in any way, but I find it rather dangerous to place that kind of business logic on such a device. He also mentioned other business logic like inventory availability, ... .

Synchronizing the created sales order took a while, but I don't mind that, because it's just all about different factors ... Network, device, memory, ... .

Last nice feature he showed was printing the receipt from the device.

My conclusion: it offers some more user-friendly stuff then the standard Microsoft Mobile Framework will, but I'm a little afraid of all the business logic that is built in which I'm going to check out what this is all about later on the conference. Anyway, I'm not thrilled about mobile solutions like this as personally, I don't like PocketPC applications for creating my sales orders anyway.

Anyway, this was the last session, and now I'm going to sleep .