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Some Exciting MMIT Case Studies
Included with MMIT is the source code
for a sample mobile web application designed for the fictional
company, "Fitch and Mather." Modeled after the
expense tracking application used internally at Microsoft,
this application allows Fitch
and Mather employees to track their expenses while on
the road using their cell phones, PDA's, or other wireless
devices. After having incorporated this MMIT application
into their existing expense tracking system, "employees
can transparently take the application offline for road
trips, have transparent synchronization of data when they
log in the next time, download their credit card expenses
directly into their expense
report and even submit and view expense items using
their cell phones and other mobile devices." The Fitch
and Mather hypothetical example has taken advantage of the
fact that MMIT applications can be used from anywhere at
anytime. "Using a mobile device, an employee can record
an expense in a report when it occurs; for example, after
dinner at a restaurant, an employee can use a mobile device
to add all the expense report information. Later, when the
employee uses the desktop browser to edit the report, the
recorded expenses are automatically included." The
applications best suited for the MMIT platform are those
which deliver up to the minute information that users constantly
need. Peter Coffee, a noted technology reporter, recalled
a conversation with Microsoft's John Montgomery in a column
published on eWeek.com. John pulled Peter aside at a
conference to show off a simple application that a few Microsoft
programmers had very quickly put together using MMIT. This
web application allowed John, using his cell phone, to view
a map of Seattle landmarks and detailed traffic information
about the route between the Microsoft campus and a selected
landmark. The same application is accessible through any
other mobile device. According to John, "Some of our
developers got mad at Seattle traffic." To help make
their travels more enjoyable and predictable, they found
an existing website which presented a live feed of traffic
statistics to internet users. They then wrote an MMIT application
to query that website, and represent its information to
mobile users, so the same information could be viewed on
a Pocket PC, Palm or any other mobile device. Peter concluded,
"That's a key point of .NET, as this example shows:
Existing Internet content can become more valuable through
the .NET interface, instead of forcing content providers
to start from scratch." This mobile web application
is currently available for viewing at http://mmit.msaui.com/pstmobile2
MMIT is also being used for B2C applications
in large enterprises. Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS),
the consortium of the 3 Scandinavian airlines, has
now deployed its MMIT solution. Their goal was to give
customers the ability to check the status of flights and
book tickets regardless of the user's location, device,
or time of day. By using MMIT to develop this web application,
users with any internet-capable device have seamless access
to this functionality. SAS chose to use MMIT because it
enabled them to reach the widest possible range of mobile
users with various cell phone and PDA devices while optimizing
their development resources.
In developing this web application,
SAS emphasized the separation of the presentation layer
from the underlying application logic, thus enabling them
to reduce maintenance costs and reuse the same code for
related applications. As new mobile devices are produced,
support for them in the SAS web application is added by
installing an update on their web server. No code changes
should be required. Additionally, by giving users the ability
to use their existing hardware to book their own flights,
SAS claims that their customer service costs have also been
significantly reduced. According to Peter Müller, Deputy
Director for the Scandinavian IT Group, "Visual Studio
.NET, along with the Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit,
was an easy choice to make. It allowed us to deliver customized
pages for myriad devices quickly and cost-effectively, plus
we have the flexibility to build in exciting new features
that will help SAS serve customers even better in the future."
Dollar Rent A Car is another company
has taken the early initiative in adopting .NET and MMIT
and is benefiting from it greatly. Dollar Rent A Car started
their .NET initiative by building an XML "web service"
interface to their existing reservation system. Now, with
MMIT, they are able to reuse this web service component
in creating a large number of applications with the .NET
platform as well as give third party developers the ability
to integrate their applications with the Dollar Rent A Car
reservations system.
One of the applications that this web
service component is being used in is a mobile website developed
created with MMIT which is accessible to all internet-capable
devices at http://mobile.dollar.com
(see screen shots in Figures 1 and 2). From this site, users
are able to find nearby Dollar Rent A Car locations as well
as view, edit, or cancel their rental reservations.
By using MMIT, Dollar became the first
rental car agency to create a web site accessible from all
wireless devices. Creating the mobile site took single developer
30-days to complete. As new devices are manufactured, support
for them will be added by installing free updates available
from Microsoft.
According to Peter Osbourne, Group
Manager of the Advanced Technology Group, ".NET enabled
us to develop a mobile Web site using our existing skill-set
and tool-set. In the end, our costs were less than ten percent
of a third-party solution, and we completed the project
two to three times as fast. We launched the mobile site
on August 29, 2001, becoming the first car rental company
to deliver a fully mobile-enabled Web site." Don Horner,
Senior Programmer/Analyst in the Advanced Technology Group,
reported, "All we had to do was build the pages once,
call our existing XML Web service to access the mainframe,
and we're good-to-go."
Appendix A
For the most up to date list of Mobile
Devices tested with MMIT see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/device/mitdevices.asp
References
Microsoft
Mobile Internet Toolkit Reviewer's Guide
Download
Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit 1.0
Microsoft
Mobile Internet Toolkit Tested Devices
Mobile
Internet Toolkit Device Updates
Traffic conditions: URL1,
URL2
ASP.NET
Mobile Controls: Tutorial Guide: Adaptive Web Content for
Mobile Devices with the MMIT
Fitch and Mather Expense Reporting
Application: URL1,
URL2,
URL3
Scandinavian
Airlines System
Dollar
Rent A Car
Redmond Traffic: URL1,
URL2
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