Through the fog... Wireless email at work dilemmas

Wireless email over Wi-Fi or a BlackBerry or even the humble pager promise constant connectivity for many workers and we hear great things about not coming back to an Inbox full of emails. But what are the drawbacks? Quocirca analyst Dale Vile weighs up the pros and cons...

There is no doubt that vibrating objects can enhance relationships and, in some cases, even save marriages. Take the business person sitting in a meeting feeling his mobile phone or pager go off in his pocket. It could be that key customer he is trying so hard to impress with his responsiveness. It could be his wife wanting to tell him that she will file for divorce if he is late back from the office one more time this week. The vibrating alert allows our hero to monitor such calls quietly and excuse himself from the meeting when they occur.

Mobile technology can thus be a good thing. As the cliché goes, it allows us to stay in touch anytime, anyplace and anywhere.

From a corporate perspective, this can lead to more rapid and continuous communication that greases the wheels of business processes, enhances customer service and facilitates rapid and informed decision-making. This is true of mobile phones and mobile email is simply an extension of the same idea.

Of course there are some negatives. Having someone preoccupied with checking incoming calls or absorbed in clearing their Inbox can be disruptive during meetings. Wireless email in particular can also lead to people being continuously distracted from the important stuff by a stream of incoming trivia that could easily wait till later.

There is then the intrusion into our personal lives. Even if our hero does make it home in time for dinner, will he really be able to switch off from work unless he is disciplined enough to switch off all of his wireless gadgets? Just because you can check your Inbox between courses, doesn’t necessarily make this a good thing.

Yet despite some of these drawbacks, wireless email is something that businesses are taking very seriously. Some 88 per cent of European corporates interviewed during a recent Quocirca study commissioned by EDS said that mobile office is relevant to their company. Furthermore, around half of these organisations had already embarked on wireless email pilots or initial rollouts. Mobile access to email is therefore becoming an increasing priority for many. So what are the considerations?

First, there is the question of gadgets. Even dinky little mobile phones such as the SonyEricsson T68i now come with an email client embedded for direct access to email servers. We then have smart phones, communicators, wireless-enabled PDAs and tablet PCs, as well as the traditional laptop computers that we all know and love.

In theory, any of these can be used as a wireless email client device. In practice, however, a reasonable size screen and ability to input text conveniently is a pre-requisite for the 'power professionals' that are typical targets for initial activity. The research confirms this. When asked which devices are relevant for mobile professionals, most people put the emphasis on the PDA and PC form factors, with many dismissing mobile phones and their variants as legitimate devices for access to corporate systems such as email. This may change as we move beyond the chunky, clunky first generation of smart phones but in the meantime organisations are pressing on with the types of device with which they are already comfortable.

The next question is how these devices get connected. The options here range from always-on connections over a GPRS or 3G network, through connection on demand with wireless LAN hotspots, to the good old-fashioned approach of dialling up from your laptop over a fixed line.

The latter is still by far the most common way for mobile users to get their email while on the road in Europe but things are changing very rapidly. In March 2003, respondents in Quocirca’s quarterly mobile research programme rated GPRS as more important than traditional dial-up when looking ahead at their communication requirements over the next two years. This is the first time that this has happened and represents a significant tipping point in attitudes.

But there still remains a fly in the ointment as mobile data charges are in many cases standing in the way of corporates scaling up their initial GPRS pilots. As Meredith Rose, chairman of the European VPN Users Association (EVUA), points out: “Our members are looking for value for money solutions – the costs need to be manageable, especially with regard to roaming.”

With a membership made up of some of the largest multinationals in Europe, and with mobility being so high on the corporate agenda, the EVUA is assuming a very proactive role in influencing the way the market will evolve.

Rose says: “We are establishing partnerships with the major multinational mobile operators in order to develop seamless, consistent, global mobile services for corporates.”

The kind of collaboration between customers and suppliers is critical as mobile operators in particular play a key role but have a poor track record in trying to second-guess the mobile data requirements of their business customers. The same is true of organisations like BT with its OpenZone public wireless LAN hotspot service. The bulk of the activity here currently revolves around enthusiastic individual professionals who pay for access on their expense accounts.

Across the board, wireless network tariffing levels and structures are deemed by many to be incompatible with large-scale corporate rollouts. It is important to get this right if we are to move from casual to serious deployment of wireless mobile solutions.

In the meantime, there is a warning for individual users tempted by the idea of buying a wireless PDA and solving the problem themselves. Companion servers that sit alongside the corporate email servers and are accessed over secure connections are usually required to enable wireless email safely. This puts IT departments firmly in the gatekeeper position and 57 per cent of them say they will not freely allow connection from personal devices to email servers.

Before buying the latest wireless gadget out of your own pocket, it is therefore best to check that with your local IT guys. And, of course, check the device has a vibrate mode too. You never know when that will come in handy.

Quocirca will be producing a full report based on the mobility research referred to in this article. Please email info@quocirca.com to register your interest in receiving a copy once it is available. More details of the EVUA may be found at www.evua.org.uk.

**Quocirca is a leading, user-facing analyst house known for its focus on the 'big picture'. For a full summary of its activities see www.quocirca.com, or reach the company's founding directors by emailing quocirca@silicon.com.

Also in this series: Through the fog... Storage as a service Through the fog... Buying an application server Through the fog... Corporate content management Through the fog... Automated speech recognition Through the fog... Public Key Infrastructure Through the fog... Vendor-channel relationships Through the fog... What future photo messaging?

For Quocirca's 'What's the fuss about...?' series for silicon.com, see this page

And for their earlier 'Surviving the Recession' series, see this page.