Infragistics Makes Commitment to “Mobile First” Design with Enterprise Mobility Suite
In late June 2014, Cranbury-based Infragistics announced that it had enhanced its business intelligence solution, ReportPlus, and collaboration solution, SharePlus, combining them into the company’s new Enterprise Mobility Suite.
NJTechWeekly.com spoke with David Mendlen, chief marketing officer, about the products and the “mobile first” approach the company is taking.
Mendlen, who had spent 14 years at Microsoft before joining Infragistics, talked about what makes the product “new.” Enterprise Mobility Suite is an integrated version of the 25-year-old company’s products SharePlus and ReportPlus.
SharePlus lets users access SharePoint corporate data from a mobile device or a tablet. ReportPlus is a data visualization product that lets users understand what’s going on with the data they find. Users can design charts or dashboards on their mobile phones or tablets using the ReportPlus feature. They can access information found in SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce or any other popular data source, the company said in a release.
With the new suite, users can drag ReportPlus charts and dashboards to connect them as part of their SharePlus experience. Bar, line and pie charts, tables, gauges and maps are supported and can be shared or displayed as a PowerPoint presentation.
Said Mendlen, “There are other companies that provide mobile access to Microsoft SharePoint information, but we seem to be the only company that is taking a mobile first approach.
“Most companies are porting their desktop experience to the mobile device,” he said. “You can imagine how bad that experience might be. We’ve really thought through what a touch experience should look like and what a native experience should be on these devices.” He added that using a mobile first approach makes the apps easier for nontechnical people to use.
Enterprise Mobility Suite has cloud features. Users can save information, dashboards and charts to the cloud — for example, on Google Drive, Dropbox and the SharePoint server — for simplified file sharing.
The suite is available in both an iOS and an Android version, and the iOS 7 version has been redesigned for look and feel. Users can export dashboards to PDF and Microsoft Word files, annotate the research, load pivot tables from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and autosave files.
Mendlen pointed out that security is important to the company’s enterprise customers, since “you are enabling the IP from a company to leap out onto a mobile device.” He said he assures users that the information is passed in a secure way and connected through a secure channel. “And if your company has policies around security, the software understands and complies with the security requirements,” he said.
He added that an IT person is not needed to get the user up and running on the products and that demonstration apps are available from the Apple App Store and Google Play. “For many enterprise mobility products there is server infrastructure required, and you need an IT person to install software and manage the process for you. These products are designed as more self-service,” said Mendlen, although he noted that many companies do avail themselves of the customizable navigation features.
