Company Magazine for the Odfjell Group - March 2005

Odfjell Smartphones project
Taking connectivity
one step further!
By Matt Duke, ICT Consultant, Network & Infrastructure
For some time
now ICT has devoted
effort into
researching and
producing an
Odfjell “Smartphone”
solution
for our employees.
Odfjell processes
around 10,000
email messages each working day,
which roughly speaking equates to
about 3.5 million email messages
yearly.
As these statistics may suggest, email is
vital for healthy business activities, and
it was requested by the business that a
“Smartphone/PDA” solution be implemented
for global mobile access. As
with all ICT projects we started by defining
a vision and scope with the business.
The vision ICT proposed for the
project was the following:
Odfjell staff will be
able to securely access
their email, calendar
and contacts from
anywhere in the
world, by the use of
Microsoft powered
mobile devices.
Bergen will be able to
host mailboxes for
staff anywhere on the
corporate Odfjell computer
network, with
the ability to connect
locally or “On the
road.” We will give
our staff unrivalled flexibility
in their ability
to get their Outlook data any place, at
any time.
From a technical perspective this offered
plenty of challenges! I’ll save our
Odfjell Quarterly readers the geeky
details, but from an ICT infrastructure
point of view this project required the
upgrade of many of our core systems,
including the primary email servers
themselves. The design documentation
itself weighed in at 53 pages, a daunting
task for Odfjell and our colleagues
at Microsoft Norway. This hard work
should be rewarded in the future as we
now have a secure, modern mobile
infrastructure that we can build upon.
Whilst initially solving the Outlook
requirements, we are sure the future
will bring requests for other “Mobile”
enabled Odfjell systems. This new infrastructure
will help us to meet these
demands.
Then we have the devices themselves.
When I first began working with
Smartphones in 2002, the battery life
was expected at one (1) day, sometimes
less for heavy use! The memory and
processors were slow and the user
experience poor. But over the past
three years the technology has really
come along. The devices we can offer
now have fast processors and a typical
battery life of 3-4 days. (Source: Odfjell
Smartphone Pilot Trial survey). But this
didn't help us in a key area: usability!
We needed the devices to be simple to
operate. My goal was to allow users to
simply press “Sync” and download their
Outlook data to the phone, without
having to go through lots of setup and
configuration tasks. In order to achieve
this goal, we enlisted some programmers
to help us code two “Odfjell
Applications”. These allow our users to
simply and effectively sync their email
from anywhere in the world that has
GSM coverage.
We have also tried to cater for two distinct
types of user. We have a smaller
“Smartphone” called the Qtek 8010,
which offers great phone functionality
and somewhat simple Outlook functionality.
This phone is great for users
who tend to do more “Reading” of
email than “Writing” The phone has
a good screen, but does not offer
the ability to read office documents
effectively.
For users who require
a more flexible device,
we offer a “PDA
Phone” the Qtek
s100. This device is
more powerful than
office desktops five
years ago! The s100
offers full Microsoft
Office functionality
(Word, Excel
and Power Point)
and access to the
important Outlook
data. The
s100 is about the
size of an iPod,
and as such it
packs a huge punch
for its size.
We have seen a dramatic rise in the
number of devices being produced by
the Smartphone manufacturers,
the latest
model of phone is
current for about 12
months before it is
superseded by a new
model. By basing
our solution on the
latest Microsoft
mobility solution,
we are “Infrastructure
Ready”
for these exciting
new devices
as and when
they are released.
The final part of the solution is that the
software can be remotely updated
securely from Odfjell servers. We are
very much at the cutting edge of
mobile technology, and we can see the
potential for virus and other risks in the
future. We have therefore opted for a
management tool that should allow us
to keep devices updated “over the air”,
so that time with the ICT support team
can be kept to a minimum. The future
of mobile security is still quite uncertain,
so we cannot guarantee that we
will not need to update the devices
locally in the year to come. However,
we have done the best with today’s
security software to protect the Odfjell
system, including the use of 128 Bit
encryption on the devices.
10 ODFJELL Quarterly March 2005