My Internet Notebook

We have an early adopter program too! It is in the press release.

iAnywhere launches early adopter program to provide participating organizations quick, convenient access to their CRM systems using BlackBerry handheld devices.

You (i.e. any BlackBerry user) can sign up for the program at http://www.ianywhere.com/mobilesalesbb and be notified when the code is ready for consumption. You will need a Salesforce.com account to test-drive the Mobile SFA for BlackBerry application. Not already a user, sign up for a free trial account over at Salesforce.com.

Microsoft CTP programs have generated some good reviews from the developers community. I hope our program will be able to offer some good values to all the reviewers.

This is a nice collection of information on Getting Started on M-Business Anywhere

In essence, if you are a Web Developer who is looking to have some fun with porting traditional web apps to PDAs and smartphones (Treo650, PocketPC Smartphone etc), you need to take a look at how M-Business Anywhere helps you ease the transition.

Incidentally, our Mobile Sales Force Automation product family is built on top of the same platform technology – M-Business Anywhere.

iAnywhere’s M-Business Server has a great feature to allow you to distribute binary files to mobile devices such as PocketPC, Palm and Symbian smartphones. This means that you can have a centralized upgrade management function, which is very useful to enterprise mobile applications.

Checkout ianywhere.com/developer for latest document on how to set binary file distribution up. By default. all binary files will be placed in the AvantGo\pods directory on the device. But if you want files to be copied to other locations. There are two easy ways to do it:

If you have only one or two files, the easiest way to do it in M-Bus server is to use meta tag to specify a location to copy a specific binary files, such as this example: <meta name=”x-avantgo-download-location” content=”mysample.exe,%AG_STARTMENU%”> , where %AG_STARTMENU% translates to Windows\Programs on PocketPC. Note that you still need to specify the link in your html body <a
href=”mysample.exe”></a>

The second method is to boundle a lot of files in a CAB file and distribute it through M-Business Server. M-Business client will automatically launch the CAB file once it is downloaded to your device. By the way, you can use the Cab Wizward tool (cabwiz.exe) in Visual Studio 2003 to create CAB files. Here is a tutorial on creating cab files.

What better topic can I find for my inaugural blog post than annoucing a project that I have been working hard on in the past six months: we released a new version of Salesforce.com Offline PDA Edition (v2.5) to the world!

In this latest release, we added localization support and other features:

• Language support for German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Brazilian Portuguese
• Initiate and track e-mails and phone calls from within Offline PDA Edition (requires upgrade to 5.7 client)
  • If you have a converged PDA/Phone device tapping on a phone number in Offline PDA Edition will automatically launch the phone dialer and create a Task associated with the phone call
  • Tapping on an e-mail address will launch the e-mail client on your device and create a task associated with the e-mail
• Renamed Tab support
• User configurable list pages – users can select the number of columns on each list page and the information which appears in each column
• Multi-value Picklist support
• Enhanced support for Long Text Area fields
• Support for editing Record Type

If you are a user of Salesforce.com’s CRM system, you would definitely appreciate the value of On-Demand computing. With Salesforce.com Offline PDA Edition, you get a Mobile CRM system in an on-demand fashion effortlessly. To get a 30 day free trial, just log into your salesforce.com accout, go to Setup, click Mobile Users, select Offline PDA Edition, then click Setup & Install. You can then follow the simple instructions to install a piece of client code on your PocketPC or Treo650 etc.

Enjoy!