Do More With Your Smartphone

Those of you with a Smartphone know it’s a powerful email device. Most of you can already synchronize your smartphones to Microsoft Outlook, accessing the Internet, and maybe a few of you have some cool games or ring tones. But there is so much more you can do and so many features you can add to your phone to make it a powerful tool to grow your business.

Voice Mail to Email
When you’re in a meeting or in transit and you can’t dial in to check a new voicemail, it’s impossible to know who it’s from, what it’s about, if it’s urgent, or if it can wait. Several companies have launched services that solve this problem by intercepting your voicemail messages and sending them as a text message to your mobile phone or smartphone. This means that the next time you receive a voicemail, you won’t need to immediately dial in to know who it’s from or what it’s about. This service costs about $30 per month. Providers include Visual Voicemail (phonefusion.com), Voicemail-To-Text (callwave.com), and PhoneTag (phonetag.com).

Network Security
Security for your corporate network is one of the most important technical challenges in your business, especially if you have remote employees. How do you best ensure that the person logging into your corporate network is really your employee? The more security checks you have in place the more secure your network will be. For example, biometric authentication is effective because in addition to knowing a password, admittance requires something unique to the user, like a fingerprint. Similarly, a mobile phone or smartphone can be used as an authentication tool. Users remotely log into their networks as they normally would. Once they are logged in, their cell phone rings and they enter # or a PIN to authenticate their identity. PhoneFactor (phonefactor.com) is one provider of cell phone authentication services.

Desktop software to Mobile application
Most off-the-shelf software is available for smartphones as well for desktops. However, when companies build customized software, the only version available is often for a desktop computer or server. As your company grows and more of your staff need mobile access to the software, what are your options? If your mobile sales team has to keep calling the office or must wait to access the data on a notebook computer, their productivity suffers. You can take almost any application that runs on your desktop computer and make it work on your BlackBerry, with full network access to shared data.

Remote Data Access
There are dozens of ways to enable access to corporate data on a mobile device. One of the options you might want to consider is Egnyte’s Mobile (m) Drive (www.egnyte.com/corp/po_mobile.html). Instead of storing your files on a local server and then worrying about how to securely make your files available to mobile users, Egnyte’s file server is online already. At this time, this feature is only available for iPhones. Access to your Egnyte file server via an iPhone is just as easy as if you were sitting at your desktop computer. One of the benefits of an on-demand file server is that you can leave your 5-pound notebook computer behind. Pricing starts at $15 per month.

WiFi Access Point Through Your Phone
Although WiFi is available in most all hotels, business centers, airports, and other locations where professionals or groups of consumers might hang out with their computers, there are some places that you might not find it. In those cases, a new application called WMWifiRouter can turn any Windows Mobile cell phone into a mobile hotspot for secure Internet access just about anywhere. WMWifiRouter, will connect to the Windows Mobile device via WiFi, USB, or Bluetooth, and users can also share their cellular data and internet connection with others for free, including Apple products like the iPhone and iPod Touch. Check it out at WMWifiRouter.com. It costs $30.