The advantages in delivering company content and capability outside the walls of the office can be clearly seen in companies that develop and deliver mobile solutions for their employees, customers and partners. Superior’s blog has explored many ways to achieve mobile app development, but how can you bridge your mobile apps into the valuable and all-important data that resides within your existing corporate systems?
Identify Core Needs First
As we suggested in our last post, any app development begins with defining its scope. When reviewing the scope of the applications you seek to build, more than likely you will need to access data residing in existing systems with your organization. Identify them right away and understand how their data interfaces operate. Does the system support web services? If not, are there other interfaces running that may result in updates you’d like to have delivered to mobile app users (perhaps via messaging like MQ or email)?
Keep Security in Mind
If your internal systems are only being used to interact with other systems safely behind your corporate firewall, they may be underprepared for the risks of opening up remote access to reach mobile devices. One of the most basic recommendations for securing web services is to be sure that calls to and from those services are operating fully encrypted over SSL. Configuring that is straight forward for most IT professionals and is table stakes for reaching into your corporate systems from outside.
Web Services – The Best Way to Get It Done
It’s great if your internal systems support web services that your mobile app can tap into. Now, it’s a matter of identifying the types of services and the existing protocols (XML, RESTful, SOAP). From there, look into the full slate of services you’ll need and document them as part of your app requirements.. Whether iOS or Android, there are standard libraries that ease web services integration, making it practically configuration-based to retrieve data from your internal system for use in your mobile app.
Since there is no one-size-fits-all solution to get existing corporate data into mobile apps, we often encourage businesses to seek an external eye to assess the situation to minimize the time and expense to reach your ultimate solution. Our team’s varied expertise will help your organization plan a worthwhile, effective mobile app. With questions, please contact Superior Technology at 845-735-3555 or online at www.superiortechnology.com.
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