Unplugged for iOS now available!

With the Unplugged XPages Engine and HTML5, we’re introducing a simple yet powerful way to extend your Lotus Notes and Domino apps to iOS devices!

Unplugged works with Domino Designer to create mobile apps for iPhones and iPads, which update via mobile sync to Domino servers. And, the HTML5-based architecture of the Unplugged XPages Engine unleashes the full creativity of the mobile user interface designer – so you can create touch-optimized, visual, customized mobile apps for iOS that look every bit as good as consumer apps.

Let us know what you think!

Unplugged at Lotusphere - Plus Beta 3 for iOS

We’ll be showing Unplugged on our stand (218-219) at Lotusphere 2012. 

In the run-up to Lotusphere we’ve shipped a new beta release of Unplugged for iOS – Beta 3 – which fixes a number of issues:

Fixes since Beta 2:

• Support for context.getUrlParameter(String)
• Support for function @totime
• iOS - DBColumn on a categorized view produces unexpected results
• Support for getItemValueDate() for iOS
• iOS - accented characters don't display correctly.
• iOS fails attempting to (incorrectly) render a page after a redirect has been sent
• Unplugged is ignoring data sources defined in custom controls
• iOS - Clicking 'No' on demo server prompt goes into a loop until you press yes.
• Support for 'Filter by column value' (<xp:this.keys>) on a data source
• <datasource>.save() does not execute on iOS
• Visiblity tag <xc:this.rendered> not working for custom controls
• iOS: xp:repeat ignores rows attribute

Beta 3 Released:   January 6, 2012

If you’re interested in joining our Beta program, just email Lyndsay_Thomson at teamstudio.com and if you are attending Lotusphere then do stop by our stand for a chat and a demo.

Unplugged for iOS

 It’s time to announce a big milestone in our Unplugged project for mobile devices: the Unplugged Engine for iOS (Beta 1) is now available.  

Back two years ago when we started developing Unplugged, the enterprise mobile landscape looked a lot different. The BlackBerry dominated the corporate smartphone market. Apple’s iPhone had become the number one premium consumer smartphone, but hadn’t made great inroads in the enterprise market. The iPad hadn’t been invented yet.

What a difference 2 years makes. Apple have added a whole set of enterprise device management APIs to iOS. C-level execs are bringing in their Apple devices and asking for them to be connected to the enterprise email and calendar systems. The iPad is being deployed or tested by 86% of Fortune 500 companies.

On November 21^st we are formally opening our Unplugged Engine for iOS Beta program. The Unplugged Engine acts as a miniature Lotus XPages server running on the iOS device, with a local datastore, a JavaScript engine, a replication client and an XSP engine working together. You create mobile apps in the Domino Designer using XPages, and these apps can read and write to the local Unplugged data store on the iOS device. Any changes to this local data are then updated with the Domino server via the next mobile sync event.

All this comes at a time when XPages is coming of age, after the recent release of the Domino 8.5.3 server and the XPages Extension Library. This latest version of the Extension Library includes a new set of Mobile Controls, which have come on a long way from the original prototype set of controls that appeared on the OpenNTF site.

Why use the Unplugged Engine on iOS devices and not simply build an online Web app using plain vanilla XPages? The simple answer is that Mobile Web apps only work well with an excellent wireless signal. With Unplugged, it’s easy to create sync-able apps that work well whatever the conditions.

If you’re interested in joining our Beta program, just email Lyndsay_Thomson at teamstudio.com. We expect the program to run for about 3 months, with full availability just after Lotusphere.

Mobile security takes center stage

It was interesting to watch the John Girard presentation on Mobile Device Security at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in London last week. I really liked his point of view on the severity of risk vs how often it occurs. There are so many mobile security vendor press releases that exaggerate some of the rare occurrences whilst the more mundane and frequent security breaches go unmentioned.

His take-home message was that the vast majority of today’s real mobile security risks can be mitigated by ensuring a secure initial device configuration, reinforced by a software agent that can watch the configuration on the phone and the tablet, that can proactively decide what to do when it detects a breach.

Click to read more ...

The Future of Apple

Well, it finally happened. Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple. Almost every article I’ve seen on this reads like an obituary. What does this mean for Apple, and what does it mean for Steve Jobs? 

For Steve, it seems pretty clear to me. When you’ve been told by your doctor you’ve got cancer that’s a pretty clear wake-up call that your remaining time on this planet is finite. One thing we can probably surmise from the announcement yesterday is that Steve is not one of the very few people that are lucky enough to see a complete remission of their pancreatic cancer. That Steve has spent so much of his time at Apple since the diagnosis shows how deeply committed he is to Apple’s mission, and how strongly the creative impulse in him still beats. Even now, he will be continuing as Executive Chairman.

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The Mobile Sync Holy Grail

I recently tweeted that 47% of the Global 500 companies are testing or rolling out iPads, according to Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer. Whether or not all these tests turn into rollouts, there is going to be a whole load of iPads (and Android and WebOS tablets too) arriving in the enterprise. This is going to lead to a knock-on pressure to connect into back-end enterprise systems so that these tablet devices can do “real work” for the business. By “real work” I mean going beyond email and calendaring to apps that streamline the vital business processes in the enterprise that support the bottom line.

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200m or 830m enterprise mobile users by 2016?

Back in June I tweeted on the ABI Research forecast, http://twitter.com/#!/sives/status/83284217521381377 predicting 830m enterprise smartphone and tablet app users by 2016. On the surface, that looked like a four-fold increase on the number of mobile devices from the 200m that I’ve previously been saying will be connected into enterprise networks over the next 5 years.

Today, I revisited the article and realized that there was a bit more to the story than I had first understood. In their forecast, ABI Research split the total audience into B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer). B2E users will be accessing email, calendar and line-of-business apps. B2C users will be using branded company-provided apps that they download from the public app stores.  

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Welcome to the new Teamstudio Unplugged site

We’ve created this at same time as we’re releasing the first beta of our new Unplugged software – Unplugged XPages Engine for Android.

Topics we’re going to cover in this blog include:

• smartphone and tablet use in the enterprise
• syncing data between mobile devices and backend systems
• syncing data between mobile devices and the cloud
• new approaches to mobile device management
• new approaches to data synchronisation

Click to read more ...