Apps That Work – Even When The Network Doesn’t

In recent years, I’ve witnessed impressive wireless advancements in terms of bandwidth, performance and coverage. Despite these gains, universal wireless coverage remains elusive. Even in urban areas, coverage can be spotty, particularly in buildings and especially elevators, basements and coolers.

Most ERP, TMS, EAM, CMMS and CAFM solutions are web-based systems with browser-based clients and back-end infrastructures optimized for supporting large numbers of users and for providing real-time data.  While this approach is an improvement over earlier systems, it's still difficult to mobilize due to the lack of a constant, reliable network connection that is required.

To ensure a mobile application works regardless of network availability, a different approach is required: an offline-capable, rich client application with a local data repository.

Why Our Approach is Unique: Today, many vendors have adopted an approach where the mobile application retrieves and stores a limited amount of data locally to support the active transaction and stores new or changed data on the device only until it can be forwarded to another system. This approach is relatively easy to implement and addresses the network connection constraint. This design also provides superior ‘perceived performance’ compared to other approaches because the resource requirements on the mobile device are minimal. Unfortunately, this approach has its constraints as well. It struggles to support high transaction volume and large amounts of supporting data-particularly if the data is volatile. Consequently, compromises in mobile application features and business processes are necessary.

Offline Support: Blue Dot’s Approach: Several years ago, Blue Dot recognized there was no single approach to supporting offline capabilities that was ideal in all circumstances. Blue Dot developed “SnapSync” which is a collection of three data synchronization and transport services to provide optimal reliability and performance to accomplish the following:

• Submit completed transactions and facilitate fast and reliable request/response style communications with other systems
• Support maintenance of lookup data and incremental updates to disseminated work packages
• Move large amounts of data quickly and reliably

Today, Blue Dot has taken our expertise and innovation around SnapSync and deployed it within our cloud-based Cyan Platform. Cyan-based mobile applications have the ability to intelligently select the appropriate service depending upon the data to be transferred, resulting in the ideal combination of efficiency and performance.