No matter what business you are in, from sales to healthcare to journalism, there can be a disconnect between the IT department and the people with “boots on the ground” who are actually using enterprise applications. Since IT people have their expertise in coding and technology and, for example, salespeople have their expertise in selling, each group looks at the application from a different point of view. A salesperson my want to tweak the application he is using to add certain fields or change his workflow, but often he has to go through the IT department to make even the smallest changes. This can be burdensome for both parties. This issue is only exacerbated by the increasing popularity of mobile devices with their smaller form factors.
Thankfully, there is one solution that can help deal with all of these issues. Cloud Extend Mobile from Active Endpoints is a natural outgrowth of that company’s Cloud Extend Desktop solution and is built on its successful ActiveVOS platform. The solution allows business users to take control. With it, they do not have to collaborate with IT to make changes in applications, and most users can learn how to use the interface in minutes, mastering it in a matter of hours.
The desktop version of Cloud Extend for Salesforce has been around for one year, and is built on the ActiveVOS platform which has been used by some of the largest companies in the world (AT&T, Disney and others) for business process automation. Cloud Extend Mobile was release just a few short months ago, but it has already received rave reviews from IT departments and business users alike.
Cloud Extend Mobile puts the power in the hands of the users. Salesforce is the anchor app, and Active Endpoints’ solution does not alter that application in any fashion. With more than 150 million workers bringing smartphones to work – with that figure expected to double by 2015 – there is a high demand for this type of solution. Salesforce has lots of screens and fields and that interface is not conducive to mobility. Furthermore, the people at Salesforce – and the people in your IT department – don’t know what you need, so giving you the ability to personalize the interface makes sense.
As for the future, Mark Taber, CEO of Active Endpoints, and John Cingari, the company’s CMO, see thousands of applications for this solution. For example, many doctors are using smartphones in the office or the hospital, and having the ability to tweak their own workflow and interface for updating EMRs or ordering tests or scans will make their busy jobs easier.
In practice, Cloud Extend Mobile is easy to use. It taps into the capabilities of the particular smartphone. For example, a salesperson could use Siri to call up his appointments and get access to his personalized user interface. He could then enter notes, for example, using speech to text or update other information using touch capabilities. If he needs to change the workflow a bit, it is easy to do on the desktop interface, and changes can be instantly published to mobile devices.
In this BYOD age, IT departments will love this solution because it frees them up to do other, more intensive work, and business users will love it because it gives them the ability to take ownership of their enterprise applications. In the end, then, everyone is happy, and that is the mark of a great solution.
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Edited by
Amanda Ciccatelli 
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