Brian Green, EMEA director of solutions management for the Waltham, Massachusetts-based ISV, said the license to OEM Extended’s XTNDConnect PC product for cradle-synching Pocket PC and PalmOS-based devices running its GroupWise collaboration suite with desktops completed the company’s portfolio of sync technologies.
For over-the-air (OTA) synchronization of smart phones, he went on, the company resells software from Finnish developer Teamware Group Oy, which has close relations with Sony Ericsson (Mobile Communications) and Nokia, Green added, while for BlackBerry devices the manufacturer, Canada’s Research In Motion, has its own synchronization technology. We also work with other companies with OTA synchronization technology such as Toffa, Messaging Architects and GPMobile to support GroupWise.
Next on the roadmap for GroupWise on mobile devices is security management, said Green. Its ZENworks systems management suite is being augmented, not only for single-console management of NetWare, Linux and Windows, but also to support mobile devices.
The issue is what’s on your corporate PDA as you leave the office and how secure is your PDA when it connects back to the corporate network, Green said. In other words, a user with a single sign-on may receive different access rights when coming in from a remote device than from when he or she is at a machine inside the corporate network.
Furthermore, mobile device form factors require adaptation of the data sent to them, he went on, and here Novell wants to bring its transcoding capabilities to play. You should be able to adapt the data, rather than having to re-engineer it to fit the device, said Green.
