Sunday, December 14, 2008

17 iPhone Applications That Boost Your Mobile Productivity

Mobile applications finally crossed the path of meeting the Enterprise as the Apple iPhone 3G debuted this year and offered one of the most superior and advance mobile operating systems to date. Combine that with data being transferred at 3G speeds and your iPhone is now a Mobile Customer Relationship Management application, or a fully loaded Expense Reporting system that can be just as effective as your enterprise applications at the office.

According to Gartner, Smart Phones make up 35% of the cell phone market today and the trends of data traffic are drastically increasing across the enterprise and at the consumer level. Analysts estimate that more than 2 trillion text messages were sent in 2007 worldwide. A company called Portio Research (a company that provides research on the mobile market) predicts that close to 2.5 trillion messages will be sent in 2009.

Whether your company has a mobile Sales Force, or your a road warrior that travels weekly - below are 17 applications worth downloading on your iPhone to stay connected, be productive, and work like you never left the office. The links to these applications will direct you to the Apple iTunes Store, so be sure to download iTunes if it is not already on your PC.

C.R.M Tools

Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant - Access leads, opportunities, and tasks using Oracle's Mobile CRM solution. Requires Oracle's licenses for Oracle's CRM solution

SalesForce Mobile - Access leads, opportunities, and tasks with Salesforce.Com's mobile version of their tool. Requires a Salesforce.Com license.

Search2Go for Salesforce.Com - This handy application allows you to access all contacts, accounts, and opportunities in a quick and efficient manner on your iPhone, and it's interface enables you to quickly view details or make calls. Learn more.

Sales 2 Target - Use this application to calculate daily weekly monthly sales to hit your quarterly quota targets.

SugarCRM for iPhone - This application is not free, but it was made by a third party partner that supports the open source CRM system Sugar CRM. Sugar CRM plans to release their own version in the near future.

Social Media Tools

Fring - Keep in contact with your sales force or co workers via instant messenger from the office, at home, or whereever you are. This application works using your Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk, Twitter, AIM & Yahoo accounts. See your buddies or co workers anywhere you go on your mobile.

Loopt - Use this tool to know where your remote sales people are and when are they visiting their customers. This tool will ensure your boss will always know exactly where you are. Loopt is a location-aware social networking app—it uses the GPS chip in your 3G iPhone (or more crudely, with the cell tower location data in the first generation iPhone) to place you on a map and to show you where your friends are and what they are up to.

Communication & Collaboration

Conference Call - This handy iPhone application enables you to schedule conference calls remotely while your on the road. The user interface links to your address book where you select those contacts who you want to participate on the call, schedule the time for the call, and this application will call every participant and bridge them on to your line by calling them. Sign up on their website and download the application on the iTunes store.

Voice Broadcast - Also By Ifbyphone, this application enables you to record messages on your iPhone using the iPhone's recording software and then is voice broadcasts your recorded message to anyone on your address book. Learn more about it on on their website.

Google Talk Mobile App - Download this application and you get several of the legacy Google Applications integrated into an iPhone like Gmail, Google Reader, etc. However, the powerful tool here is Google Talk which enables you to speak into your handset and find out where you can by lunch or where your next client meeting is.

Mbox Fax To Email
- This tool enables you to get faxes directly to your iPhone and much more. It is basically a communication hub right in the palm of your hand. Other capabilities include text and voice messaging.

iDial U Drive - Lets you schedule multiple calls while you drive in a way that just requires you to touch one button on the screen. Save the time looking up contacts or dialing multiple numbers.

Remote Access To The Office

Mocha VNC - Need to access files on another computer but your on the road? This is your solution to get your files on your iPhone by accessing your PC back home or at the office?

Enterprise Email - With iPhone 2.0 software, iPhone does even more for your enterprise. It supports Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, delivering push email, calendar, and contacts. Learn more about it here.

More Productive Email

Easy Writer - The iPhone's Portrait style keyboard is not always the most accurate way to send emails while your on the road. This handy application enables you to get a Landscape Style Soft Keyboard when sending email on the iPhone.

Expense Reporting

Expense2Go For Salesforce.Com - A great tool for capturing your expenses while your on the road using the iPhone's camera to take snapshots of receipts, and sync them up into Salesforce.Com.

Business Card Scanner

Card Lasso - Scan your business cards using your camera, synchronize the photo in the cloud, and minutes later the card is available for syncing and downloading in SalesForce.Com, Outlook, or wherever.

That is about it for now, but feel free to let us know what other applications should be on this list. I am certain we have missed a few so let us know.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great list of apps here.

Anonymous said...

You should include iBCard, this new business cards application, I found by accident in the app store becase there are so many. But they have a free version and I use it alot to conduct business with other students.

Rick Timmis said...

Abazander Ltd has just completed the development of iSAM Mobi v 1.0, and its available for the iPhone now.

It supports SugarCRM CE version 5.5 and upwards. Here's some brief details from their website, I hope its useful.

iSAM Mobi – iPhone Mobilisation for iSAM and SugarCRM

Do you want access to your SugarCRM or iSAM system data from your iPhone?

iSAM Mobi is an easy and intuitive iPhone app giving you real-time read/write access to your SugarCRM or iSAM sales and marketing system.

More details available at http://bit.ly/9IWb3N

Martin C. Le said...

MobileCRM is a solution to manage SugarCRM on your iPhone. it supports LDAP. You can view, edit, add and delete records offline and then synchronize with your server. MobileCRM is highly customizable. You can configure the list view, detail view and edit view just as you do with your SugarCRM. MobileCRM loads metadata in each SugarCRM module to the iPhone.

It is available on itune here: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/ptt-mobile-for-sugarcrm/id376796112?mt=8