This week we at Taptera hosted a webinar alongside Box and Sunbelt Rentals to demystify for the hundreds of attendees the challenges surrounding document management. We focused in on the benefits of taking corporate content on the road — mobilizing it alongside one’s workforce, as we’re in the business of enterprise mobility solutions.
The last chunk of the webinar was a great Q&A that we thought other people might benefit from hearing more about. Primarily the questions fell into three buckets that I’ll review here.
Security
When it comes to keeping corporate documents secure, many people are still scared about the cloud and mobile access. Too many articles come out about data breaches and exposed information to leave everyone feeling safe and secure. We understand that but we also rely on best practices gleaned from years of mobile product development. Our approach? Leverage apps that verify a user at the app’s launch — don’t let them get to anything unless they can authenticate.
Through our work with Box we also are able to utilize their encryption in transfer and storage, which is huge. The other thing to remember is that having your sales team out in the field with hundreds of physical documents isn’t super secure either. Just to put it in perspective, foot traffic is just as likely to cause harm as digital security.
Rollout
Many people wanted to know about best practices for rollout and end-user adoption. We now have almost two years under our belts at Taptera alone tackling this very issue. The number one and two suggestions we make are to involve your end user in the selection process and focus on the user interface. If the UI is bad, adoption will be too. It’s just the nature of the mobile beast and if your customers don’t feel like they have a say in the process then they won’t become advocates for it to other people they work with. Regardless of whether or not you offer mobile apps to your whole company or just a slice, to start, these two considerations must be made as you approach your rollout.
Content variety
Companies today aren’t just dealing with content types from the Office suite of old. Video, images, a myriad of alternate file types, audio recordings, etc. — you name it, we’ve seen it. The content market is diverse and continuity is not assured in any organization we’ve ever worked with. You’re not alone, which is the good thing. That said, it’s important to find a mobile document management solution that takes the word “document” loosely and can support all iOS content formats too. So far, Taptera hasn’t run into any format that we don’t support, which we take as a good sign for our preparedness.
The companies we were talking to this week were genuinely interested in the value that can be derived from mobile content management that’s seamless with your other chosen solutions. In this case the solution we focused on was Box and the Crescendo app that we built to offer offline document access in a branded environment and that can be pushed content for employees on the go. We’ve said before how great it is to build on the Box platform, and this app is a perfect example of that and our experience with Box as well.
It was terrific as well for attendees to see how a market leader in rental equipment, Sunbelt Rentals, has been evolving their own mobility solutions over the last four years or so and how distinct the various stages of evolution have been! As mobility matures each day, it’s important to keep an open mind when making mistakes sometimes and then iterate on top of them.
Chris O’Connor is co-founder and CEO at Taptera. A builder at heart, Chris enjoys creating teams, systems and companies. He is passionate about improving employees’ relationships with their software and had 15 years’ experience bringing innovative IT solutions to Fortune 500 companies. During his eight-year tenure at Genentech, Inc., Chris held various senior roles including associate director of cloud and mobile solutions and principal systems architect. For more info please contact: hello@taptera.com and follow along on Twitter @Taptera.