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For the past 3+ years, at Matrix we have been evaluating smart phones for corporate use. For most companies, the selection of a smart phone device is a non-issue: its RIM's Blackberry product and associated BEZ (Blackberry Enterprise) server.

Being a Waterloo University engineering graduate, I certainly would have no qualms about going the Blackberry route for a corporate smartphone device. However, working through the evaluation process at the corporate level puts a different perspective on these devices.

The biggest issues are: cost (device, dataplans, setup), maintenance, usability (not always in that order) and finally farther down the list - application platform. By application platform I am referring to custom business applications that are outside of contacts, email and calendar. I suspect as time goes on the application platform item will become more important at Matrix, but right now its not a priority.

Matrix users at present though have very basic requirements for a smartphone - they want it to work well as a phone, and be able to use it as a tool for managing their calendar, contacts and email in that order.

The Blackberry excels at these, but its requirement for a server to enable corporate messaging makes it more costly than other offerings, when you factor out the device as an application platform.

While the Blackberry Enterprise Server provides more value in terms of features, the market it was designed to serve has changed since its inception. The security measures on other platforms, while not as sophisticated perhaps as the BEZ, are good enough to be effective (more about this later). The dataplan monitoring and restrictions were something that used to be important - but now that phone companies are being forced to provide more logical plans that offer data pooling and reasonable data limits, the requirement for centralized monitoring has diminished significantly. The BEZ acts as a platform for software development - but other platforms are now providing sophisticated developer tools as well.

Finally the BEZ requirement adds yet another server (albeit virtual) that requires licenses, maintenance, updates, expertise and attention. The additional requirement of a CAL for devices connecting to the BEZ add another layer of cost - especially when you consider that many companies already pay for Exchange CALs.

So at Matrix, the focused shifted to evaluating mobile devices that could directly connect to Exchange via the Exchange push mechanism - which narrowed the search to Windows Mobile based devices.

Found this great ajax site that lets you make just about any 'Working' icon that you need. I have used it now in several of the multithreaded apps that I have recently put together that load up big chunks of data, do calculations or draw graphs.

The site lets you quickly choose whatever type (macintosh style, windows style, progress bars etc) of busy indicator, set a colour, background and then generates it for you ready to download.

Find it HERE:

Microsoft has released an extensive set of templates for sharepoint.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/wssapps/default.mspx

They cover all sorts of applications. This is quite timely, as I am about to deploy a corporate intranet starting next week.....

These were recommended to me by Steve as great site for design resources:

http://www.stylegala.com/archive/
http://www.k10k.net/
http://daringfireball.net/
http://www.whatdoiknow.org/

I have been building a fairly sophisticated business metrics and time managment system for my employer recently.

To bring the tool to the next level, I am making use of a number of third party components. There are some excellent resources out there for this sort of develompent, both commercial and open source.

Fascinating article on the use of a Linux array to generate visual displays of enormous amounts of 3d data.

http://www.llnl.gov/str/November04/Louis.html

The software used for making these 'powerwall' displays is open source, and available for download - very interesting!

http://chromium.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html

Doesn't look terribly hard to setup either - at least this part of it..

Here is an application of it using terraserver: http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/wall/tsb.html

There are have been a few good articles on User Interface design lately. My favorite publication for high tech news and trends The Economist has a great one: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3307363.

It points out several trends I have been seeing as well - that the PC is doomed to die, and fade into the background as an interesting anomaly of the times. Well, probably not completely, but its prominance will be greatly reduced.