Robert Smart

Mobile innovation applications for the BYOD enterprise user

As employees began to bring their consumer mobile devices to the office, employees expected corporations to embrace or to provide solutions similar to consumer solutions they were used to on their smartphones. However, because of accountability and security concerns, many enterprises prefer employees use corporate alternatives to popular consumer apps. However, many of these expected enterprise alternatives to consumer solutions were not available to employees. In this paper, we discuss lessons learned during the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) transformation process leading to the rapid development and deployment of internal alternatives to consumer applications, as well as the introduction of technologies to reduce the cost brought on by a large influx of mobile devices connected to the enterprise. We also discuss the importance of a filtered approach to access content through the firewall into the enterprise arena as an alternative to the full virtual private network approach granted to PC devices.

Extending Web Browsers with a Unity 3D-Based Virtual Worlds Viewer

Many virtual worlds are accessed via a rich client interface that must be downloaded and installed into the users environment. For many users, especially enterprise users, this large download and install represents a significant obstacle to virtual world acceptance. The authors describe a technical implementation that uses the Unity 3D browser plug-in as a way to access a virtual world from within a Web browser. Using this familiar tool, users can interact with the rich virtual environments provided by Second Life and OpenSimulator.

Leveraging microservices architecture by using Docker technology

Microservices architecture is not a hype and for awhile, started getting attention from organizations who want to shorten time to market of a software product by improving productivity effect through maximizing the automation in all life circle of the product. However, microservices architecture approach also introduces a lot of new complexity and requires application developers a certain level of maturity in order to confidently apply the architectural style. Docker has been a disruptive technology which changes the way applications are being developed and distributed. With a lot of advantages, Docker is a very good fit to implementing microservices architecture. In this paper we will discuss about how Docker can effectively help in leveraging mircoservices architecture with a real working model as a case study.

A secure extensible container for hybrid mobile applications

An agile, lightweight, but secure extensible hybrid application container and deployment mechanism for mobile devices has the potential to provide improved cross platform support, reduced development lifecycle time and a consistent application security model within large organizations. We demonstrate how such an architecture can provide a set of security and mobile device management interfaces to lightweight applications written in a high level markup and scripting language and also how these applications can be provisioned via push or pull mechanisms to an Enterprise users device. The use of such a container for hybrid applications widens the potential support and development resource within an organization to employees possessing readily available skill sets, this permits mission critical applications to be developed in a much shorter time frame than with native mobile application deployment methods.

Implementing a cloud backed scalable note-taking application with encrypted offline storage and cross platform replication

The act of taking notes is second nature to most people in the business and academic world where note-taking can play a variety of important roles such as aiding memory recall of events, idea capture, problem solving or visualization of complex systems and concepts through the use of diagrams or sketches. Whilst the traditional paper based form of note-taking is sufficient in most cases and actually superior in others to digital note-taking, the digital form does have some compelling advantages including the ability to search through notes, back them up, have ubiquitous access to them and augment them with captured digital media. Implementing these digital enhancements presents a challenge especially when combined with a requirement to provide a highly secure storage environment to protect confidential notes. In this paper we describe an architecture that provides these features whilst maintaining a high level of scalability and security through the use of cloud based services.

Secure cross-platform hybrid mobile enterprise voice agent

Voice is a very compelling natural interface for mobile computing devices. However, mobile operating system speech solutions (e.g., Siri, Google Voice Search) are platform-specific, making their integration within an enterprise environment difficult due to the lack of uniformity in the user experience as well as concerns over privacy and confidentiality. Hybrid apps can overcome these enterprise-specific challenges by allowing for fast deployment of functionality that is accessible across mobile platforms and enabling secure containerization of resources. But such hybrid apps often encounter significant performance slowdown due to the overheads associated with cross-platform compatibility and security. In this paper, we introduce a new secure mobile voice agent for enterprise voice interface applications on mobile devices that overcomes these issues. The proposed voice agent architecture enables confidentiality, enterprise integration, good cross-platform performance, and easy portability to multiple mobile platforms (such as Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry). Our approach avoids the need to manage multiple native speech engines across mobile OS platforms, reducing the time to deploy cross-platform voice interface solutions, and ensuring a cohesive user experience. In addition to describing the architecture and design of our mobile voice agent, we also provide a comparative analysis of its performance on various contemporary mobile computing platforms.