Making the migration to mobility

You've been stuck in the office long enough. Wilting rubber plants and the coffee machine don't do it for you any more. You want to take your business on the road. What do you do next?

Plan. Shop around. What you are about to do isn't cutting-edge any more. There are applications and products and plans and services out there, and any number of providers are keen to sell to you.

Before you can do business anywhere, you need to really understand how you are doing business now. Then you will be in a position to make the changes.

Some of what you do may be unique and highly competitive, but a lot is what every other small business needs to do.

Put your efforts into what makes you special, and find the specialists for the rest.

Rather than building a custom website, it may be enough to use a hosted product with transaction capability. In fact, how much back end IT do you really need around the office?

A robust communications infrastructure, which will be your first priority, means you don't need to care where your data and applications are - you just want to be sure they are at your fingertips when you need them.

Many big firms use third party logistics; maybe you should too.

In fact, all sorts of software and services which used to be the preserve of large corporates are becoming more widely available, as a result of computing power coming down in price.

A carefully planned migration into mobility will put you in a strong bargaining position.

Competition is so intense the ratecard gets put aside and the bundles come out, if you know what you are looking for.

Telecom and Vodafone are both fighting hard for the mobile business market.

Telecom has its new T3G offering; Vodafone has its GPRS network and the 3G network coming later this year.

Telecom is keeping its wireless hotspot service free until April 30, to allow people to test the benefits of mobility. It remains to be seen if the $9.95 an hour charge comes back on at that stage.

A current list of hotspots is at www.telecom.co.nz/wirelesshotspots.

If you want wider cover, Telecom's Mobile Broadband service offer a range of data options, starting from the casual rate of $8 per Mb - about 200 emails - to a $199 a month plan which gets you up to 500Mb of data.

For medium users with smartphones or mobile data cards it recommends the 100 Mb a month option for $52.44.

It has additional services such as an email alert service, which sends a text message through to your phone when an email arrives that you consider important (perhaps because of subject or sender).

Vodafone's casual data plan starts at $10 a Mb. A 3 Mb plan, sufficient for 600 emails a month, costs a $10 a month access fee, and its 120 Mb plan - that's 24,000 or so emails, if you're that popular - is $65 a month.

Kevin Kenrick, Telecom's general manager mobile, says the T3G offering includes a range of communications tools to let people work wherever they want, with whatever communications tools they have.

These include Email+, Sales+ and Service+, which bring office applications to sales or service representatives out in the field.

"With Mobile Broadband - our new T3G network - internet access is not restricted to a particular site," Kenrick says. "It can be used anywhere within Telecom's 027 coverage area.

"All you need to do is plug a data card or a data-capable mobile phone into your laptop and launch your internet browser."

Email+ provides employees in the field with access to not only their email but personal information stored on their desktop, such as contacts, notes and calendar.

New emails and information changes such as new appointments or task are automatically pushed to mobile devices.

Any changes made from the device itself also synchronise back to the office desktop.

Service+ is a wireless job dispatch and management solution for mobile service teams.

"Service+ improves the productivity of mobile workforces such as service technicians, trades people, inspection workers and mobile franchises," says Kenrick.

"It brings the power of large, industry-standard job dispatch and management systems at a small fraction of the cost."

Wellington film production company Sauce uses Mobile Broadband to co-ordinate its production process, particularly for advertisements.

Each second of normal television-quality footage is about 30 Mb of data.

Executive producer Darryn Smith says field crews use laptops with Mobile Broadband data cards to send back completed footage so it can be checked by senior producers and directors.

He says that allows staff to work on a project from several different locations, increasing efficiency and keeping costs and prices down.

"Before Mobile Broadband, we wouldn't have bothered trying to communicate until we got back to the office," Smith says.

"Instead of being constantly required onsite to direct footage or shot set-up, our senior staff can now get on with work somewhere else, and only need to get involved when everything is ready to be checked and approved."