1 - Why Wireless Now?

Markets are always demanding new and innovative value-added applications for specific industries and organizations. Wireless technology offers a new paradigm to greatly improve processes and organization. The opportunity to extend applications to mobile users is now.

• Cost reduction: An obvious result of mobile computing is its ability to bring cost savings to enterprises by reducing the latency and manual steps involved. It also lowers the cost of communication; perhaps the most obvious is long-distance or toll calls. Witness how Europeans and Asians are using Short Messaging Service (SMS) to communicate. It’s efficient, easy, and inexpensive. Mobility does not replace face-to-face meetings or personal phone calls, but it sure complements them.
  
  
• Productivity: One of the greatest advantages of mobility is allowing applications and person-to-person communication to become pervasive. It is not necessary to be at a PC to keep a process moving. People can make decisions while on the go.
  
  
• Competitive advantage: Allowing your customers to contact you or your applications at any time gives you an advantage. Your customers can query your product catalogs, inventory. By providing new channels to reach your users, enabling anywhere, anytime communication are just a few examples of how you and your enterprise can grow and increase sales.

2 - Wireless Myths Deconstructed

“Wireless and voice technology is too complex”
If you are looking to build a wireless application or wireless enable and existing application, it is actually very simple. There are many misconceptions that wireless technology has too many languages, too much infrastructure, and too much learning. OracleAS Wireless takes away all that complexity! Say you have an existing web-based PC application. The presentation layer is HTML. With OracleAS Wireless, you expose the functions of your application you want to wireless enable in a single open standard language (XHTML - similar feel to HTML). When you run that application through OracleAS Wireless, it will be translated to all devices, including voice. If you want to add alerting abilities (voice alerts, SMS alerts, etc.) you can call OracleAS Wireless standard Web services - just like your PC application. Your wireless learning curve is minimal. The toughest part is actually choosing what you want to wireless enable.

“You can take PC web content and easily reformat it for mobile devices”
PC Web content is designed for at least a 800 x 600 screen. Mobile screens are sometimes 80 x 60. There is no way to take a mobile browser and easily navigate through all that functionality from a PC web page. There is no "set rules" to shrink content down to mobile screen size. The mobile developer needs to consider the functionality that should be made available on the mobile browser.

“Wireless is Not Secure”
Actually wireless is secure, at least as secure as wired connections. As data is transmitting over the air, it is close to impossible to decode it. It is only at times where data is residing unencoded to the public that data vulnerable, and this is prevented in an enterprise deployment. As users access enterprise applications, access control is carried out at the application server side by checking the permissions set for the authenticated user. Sensitive data residing at the server side in the database can be protected via encryption and access controls.

3 - How does wireless infrastructure work

There are several components necessary to wireless enable an existing enterprise application. On the backend, there is the existing enterprise application. The application contains the business logic to make decisions and deliver the appropriate information to the user. In addition, the backend may contain the data the enterprise application is based on - this is standard for any PC application.

In order to wireless enable the exiting application, a middle tier is added consisting of OracleAS with the Wireless Option. The middle tier acts as a "smart browser". Since it is a "smart browser", developers do not need to be concerned with the type of mobile device used. The smart browser receives the requests for the wireless application from any wireless device and adapts the output for the mobile device. Adapters are provided by OracleAS to link data with existing applications and the middle tier.

The front-end consists of the devices providing mobile access to the enterprise applications. A mobile user can access the application from a number of mobile channels. The channels may be through voice interaction with regular phones, through personal digital assistants (PDAs), or through messaging devices like e-mail and SMS. The mobile devices have access to the application server through a wireless network supplied by a wireless network provider.

4 - How is wireless technology being used today

Financial Use Case
In the financial and telecom markets there is interest in providing greater access to services that increase value and customer loyalty for the customer base. A great way to provide increased services to the financial and telecom customer base is by offering wireless access to services. For a financial service provider it may be providing a customer with access to their account information or the ability to conduct a transaction such as an investment trade or purchase of goods. The customer could also pre-configure their account to receive information alerts on the latest stock prices, market information, or sale items they are interested in. These types of information alerts could allow the customer to make a purchasing decision and take action upon it with up to the minute information.

Corporate Use Case
For the corporate user, access and alerts to information can increase their ability to sell more products or cut down on response time for customer service. The sales person on the way to their customer appointment could request the customer account information, location with directions, latest orders, and latest complaints. As he drives to the account he could request updates on the customer's issues. When he is in the meeting with the customer, he could be able to receive alerts on inventory updates, place an immediate order, or send documentation directly to the customer's e-mail for their evaluation. With the sales person's increased ability to efficiently use his time, he could be able to visit an increased amount of customers and increase sales.

Law Enforcement Use Case
With greater emphasis on homeland security, all law enforcement agencies are in greater need of up to the minute information, easier documentation processes, and faster response times to emergencies. Law enforcement could use wireless technology while out of the office to receive suspect information, input violations, document activities, be alerted to potential threats, and notify others in dangerous situations. Using wireless technology can help manage the high demands on law enforcement with the ability to respond quickly, accurately, and effectively.

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5 - Getting Started with Oracle’s wireless and voice technology

OracleAS Wireless and Oracle Database Lite
Oracle has been committed to the mobile industry since 1996. Two Oracle products are used to wireless and voice enable applications: OracleAS Wireless and Oracle Database Lite. Both mobile products are part of the Oracle Application Server and utilize the Oracle Database. On top of these infrastructure pieces, Oracle has created two suites to run enterprises. Both the e-Business Suite and the Collaboration Suite have wireless and voice abilities leveraged from OracleAS Wireless and Oracle Database Lite.

OracleAS Wireless: OracleAS Wireless offers a platform to build, test and deploy wireless applications. For example, if you have a J2EE application, you can use OracleAS Wireless create a "mobile view" of your application or you can use the platform so your application can send voice and SMS alerts to phones. In order to get started with OracleAS Wireless, you have two choices: 1) download and install the full product. You can get a description on how to do this from the download page. Documentation on how to do this is on the documentation page. 2) You can download JDeveloper and use the Oracle Wireless Developer's Kit to build and test wireless and voice applications. In both of these options, after you have created your application, it can be registered with the Mobile Studio to test your application on real devices or call a phone number to interact with your application through voice technology.

Oracle Database Lite: Oracle Database Lite offers a Mobile Development Kit to provide the facilities, tools, APIs and sample code to develop mission critical mobile, disconnected applications. The Oracle Database Lite Mobile Development Kit supports Windows, Palm Computing, EPOC, and different flavors of Windows CE such as Pocket PC, HPC-Pro on different chip sets such as StrongARM, MIPS, SH3, and SH4. The Oracle Database Lite download page offers links to the latest downloads.

The rest Mobile Tech Center consists of technical papers, discussion forums, tutorials, samples and tools to get you started with using OracleAS Wireless and Oracle Database Lite.

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