Companies that develop mobile apps for their employees, customers and partners see clear business advantages.  The apps act as platforms that make your content available outside the walls of an office. To properly design  your mobile apps to fill an important business need, there are some simple steps to follow:

To begin, you must define your scope.  What do you want the app to do? List the features you want to include. When reviewing the proposed app, you will also need to address how to access data residing in your existing systems. Identify this  right upfront to understand how the  data interfaces operate. Does the system support web services?  Do you have other other interfaces running that may require updates such as notifications, chatting, messaging, etc.

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. This is straight forward for most IT professionals and is critical for reaching into your corporate systems from outside.

Once you identify the types of services and the existing protocols (XML, RESTful, SOAP) that need to be accessed, look into the full slate of services you’ll need and document them as part of your app requirements. Whether it is 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.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to get existing corporate data into mobile apps, and 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.