iPad Gets Better Access To Enterprise Documents

People in business love their iPads, but not everything works well on the devices. The built-in viewers for PDFs and Office documents are not that great and accessing documents can be inconvenient. One answer is Nexus from ionGrid.

Typically, in order to view a document on an iPad, you need to copy it--via email or the cloud or some other inconvenient method--and open it. This adds extra steps to the process, can be slow for large documents, and presents security problems because of the storage of potentially sensitive data on the device.

Nexus solves this by using a special server and app that stream the documents securely from companies to employees' iPads. The Nexus app includes a variety of document viewers with high-quality rendering and the ability to annotate and, in some cases, do simple editing. ionGrid focused on what it perceives as the most popular and important file types: Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, PDF, various image formats, and text files.

In the video below from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in November, ionGrid CEO Nick Triantos demonstrates Nexus.

The Nexus server at the enterprise proxies access to SharePoint servers and Windows file shares, meaning that these sensitive resources need not be directly accessible from the iPad. ionGrid also offers a partially hosted solution. The server preprocesses documents in order to pre-render and encrypt them. Because documents are preprocessed and streamed, you can begin to read and work on a document almost immediately and potentially well before a large document has finished transferring to the iPad, saving time.

Enterprises are constantly struggling with conflicting imperatives of security, reliability, and making their executives happy. ionGrid Nexus aims to satisfy all of these without forcing IT to make big changes.