Strategy for syncing data with mobile phones?

Question

We built a .NET server application that hosts data (contacts, email, etc.). We'd like to sync our data to mobile devices: iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc.

How should we go about doing this?

• Build several mobile apps, one for each platform (e.g. app for iPhone, app for Blackberry, etc.), each app syncs with our server.

• License Microsoft Exchange protocol technology from Microsoft, so that our server application pretends to be an Exchange server, thus making syncing work automatically on all the different platforms (As we understand it, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc. all have built-in syncing capability with Microsoft Exchange).

Are there other options to consider?

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

One option you should definitely consider is Oracle’s mobile enterprise application platform. This is a combination of several different products such as Database Lite Mobile Server, ADF Mobile, and JDeveloper.

The mobile enterprise application platform allows you to write the code once, using JDeveloper, and create packages for multiple mobile architectures, using ADF Mobile. Database Lite Mobile Server can provision the apps out to the mobile devices. After that, you can monitor and manage the mobile devices from the mobile server management console. Here are some links to more info:

ORACLE MEAP: http://bit.ly/fQbXUL

Database Lite Mobile Server: http://bit.ly/eJOzhN

One caveat is that the data needs to be stored in an Oracle Database on the backend. Hope that helps, good luck solving the problem.

-- Eric