InformationWeek

June 23, 1999

Mobile Synchronization

Computers are coming out of the office and into the big, wide portable world-where anything is possible

By Logan Harbaugh

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obile devices of all sizes continue to proliferate, and IT managers are being asked more often for help with synchronization. Data stored on a user's PC or on the company network needs to be moved to portable devices, and changes on one side need to be reflected on the other.

Portable devices range from notebook PCs and home PCs of telecommuters to Windows CE and Palm devices to pagers, cellular phones, and wristwatches. Each has its own set of solutions, and supporting them all can be a problem for busy IT managers--especially in an environment without set standards for the devices.

Two main concerns confront IT managers who need to support synchronization: What devices do your users have and what kinds of data will you be working with? Depending on the answers, you may be able to use the synchronization utilities bundled with the devices, or you may find yourself supporting one, two, or even a half-dozen different utilities.

If all the devices are either standard portables or WinCE palmtops, the task is greatly simplified; it's harder to support an array of devices. Likewise, if all users are on Microsoft Outlook 95 or 97, synchronization is greatly simplified, compared with synchronizing different personal information managers, E-mail programs, or data sets. For instance, while some databases, enterprise resource planning, and customer-relationship management programs offer clients for palmtop devices, some programming is required, and other programs that don't yet offer the clients require a good deal of custom programming to get them running.

In this article, we'll cover the range of devices and data you might want to synchronize, what tools are available, and what strategies you may want to develop to simplify things.

Portables
Portables are the easiest to synchronize with a desktop because the two systems are so similar. The same applications can reside on both, and all you need to worry about is the data. With Windows 95 and 98, synchronizing the data is straightforward: Use the built-in Briefcase utility. Files dragged from their location on a user's PC or the network to the Briefcase on the portable can then easily be synchronized, updating files that have been changed on either side. Synchronization can be accomplished using a LAN connection while in the office or remotely using a dial-up connection.

One problem with this method is that most programs won't recognize the Briefcase as a valid location for the Recently Opened Files list. Another is that the user must click on the folder and choose the Synchronize command to ensure that files are updated. Other products, such as Symantec's Mobile Update, can update files and deliver a choice of methods, as well as add features such as E-mail notification of the changes.

Windows CE
Windows CE is rapidly gaining in popularity and now delivers two distinct form factors: the CE handheld and the CE Pro, which resembles a very small notebook. The handheld is necessarily limited by the size of the display, but in other respects the two provide the same applications and features, with the exception of a PC Card slot on the CE Pro devices.

This PC Card slot allows the same connectivity options supported by full-size portables, including Ethernet. A number of manufacturers have introduced WinCE- compatible Ethernet cards, which use less power than standard Ethernet cards. For the handhelds, the options are generally only serial or infrared interfaces, although CE handheld devices that support the CompactCard specification may be able to use Xircom's CompactCard 10 Ethernet interface, which allows CE devices to be synchronized over the network at much higher speeds than those possible over a serial connection.

Keep in mind that CE devices, unlike standard portables, use Microsoft CE applications: Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, Pocket Outlook, and Pocket PowerPoint. These applications don't use the standard file formats, so files must be translated between platforms. This can result in the loss of some formatting on the CE device. How that formatting is restored when the file is resynchronized with the PC depends to a great extent on the synchronization software.