Symbian OS devices are important to Extended Systems, albeit mainly in Europe. According to Chris Atwell, UK Country Manager, upwards of 50% of Extended Systems business in Europe relies on Symbian OS devices. Ironically it could be more. "Am I going to give a Nokia 9300 to an engineer who's going to repair a forklift truck or an elevator?" asks Chris. "They would love it, but it wouldn't be a practical solution. We could certainly do more with Symbian OS devices if someone made a rugged device, preferably with a barcode reader."

So why is there so much interest in a rugged Symbian OS device from a company which is best known for providing mobile email to executive and white collar workers?

Extended Systems principal product is OneBridge, an enterprise grade middleware platform designed to deal with all the device management, security issues and application requirements of a mobile enterprise. Mobile email is just part of this, but an important one; OneBridge most often penetrates an organization as a mobile email solution. "While a company's executives may be crying out for mobile email," says Chris, "our proposition is that, while you can implement the OneBridge platform and resolve the mobile email requirement, when other parts of the business, salesmen, service engineers, start to make demands for mobile applications, OneBridge can leveraged to fulfill those requirements too."

OneBridge consists of two main components, the middleware server that sits inside the enterprise and a device-side client. The middleware server can communicate with a range of enterprise database servers using native drivers, SQL or web services. The "linking" is undertaken with a visual tool included in OneBridge. The middleware also controls rules on synchronization, is it at a field level or record level, how to handle conflicts, and can include additional business rules.

On the device, an application interacts through a set of OneBridge APIs. These APIs not only control data access, but features such as data encryption and compression as well as authentication. Given the importance of authentication, OneBridge supports active directories, secure ID and most popular enterprise authentication models.

This client-server model is critical in Chris' opinion. "Most of our customers won't tolerate an application that doesn't work when there is no network connection," says Chris.

While mobile email and PIM is delivered "out of the box" mobile applications can be delivered through one of three routes. Some mobile enterprise applications can be delivered as shrink-wrapped solutions, such as mobile sales. "There might be some tweaking and integration with the backend on these solutions," says Chris. "But the GUI is usually right; particularly for smaller companies, because they are happy to make some compromises about the way it looks."

For more specialized needs Extended Systems has a professional services team, based in Bristol, UK. "Our professional services team has a series of templates, libraries, screens, authentication consoles, and the like," says Chris. "Using these, and following best practices for requirements gathering, they can build pretty much any application."

The final option is a totally bespoke solution, undertaken by either Extended Systems or one of its partners. On Symbian OS devices the OneBridge client can be accessed by applications written in either C++ or Java.

According to Chris, it was not too long ago that a thousand-seat implementation of OneBridge seemed large. These days, ten thousand is not uncommon. This change in scale has been one of the drivers behind the addition of several features to OneBridge in its latest release, version 5. "In implementations of this size IT managers want to manage their mobile solutions the way they manage the rest of their IT infrastructure," says Chris. "So we have been beefing up monitoring, adding for example, a web interface that allows remote monitoring of system performance." There have also been improvements in security; data is now encrypted on the device not just between the server and client. Lost or stolen devices can also be killed remotely. Enterprises can now audit their devices remotely to see firmware versions, OS versions, processing types, memory, and battery status. OneBridge can dynamically audit a device too, to check it has the most current version of the client-side application; if it does not, then OneBridge can send a new version of the application and install it on the device.

In addition to S60 support, the latest version of OneBridge delivers significantly extended battery life, although this has been less of an issue for Symbian OS devices than some of the others supported by OneBridge. "On a device that could receive a couple of hundred emails a day, keeping a live connection going was a challenge on some devices," says Chris. "Devices like the Sony Ericsson P910 have always delivered good battery performance, but now we have delivered upwards of a 40% improvement. This really matters to Pocket PC devices, but obviously improves battery life on Symbian OS devices too."

One of the curious aspects of Extended Systems' support for Symbian OS, given that its European business relies so heavily on Symbian OS devices, is why S60 support has been missing until this latest release. It is even stranger when you consider that Extended Systems was supporting the Psion Revo back in the 90s and later the first Symbian OS smartphone, the Nokia 9200 Communicator.

"It has a lot to do with processor speed and device memory," explained Chris. "S60 devices have only recently started to have specification which make it practical to support our off-line model. We have always set a lower limit on devices we will support, as we have no interest in saddling our customers with a support nightmare, and on millions of devices too. It would not be a good problem to face."

So if Symbian OS devices do so well in Europe, why not the US? Chris believes that one of the main challenges for Symbian OS in the US is the operator's reticence to support multiple platforms. "Most network operators can cope with two options, but not three," says Chris. "So in the UK and the rest of Europe it is pretty much a case of Symbian OS or Windows Mobile. In the States it is Palm or Windows Mobile." If Symbian OS devices can break this duopoly Chris would be happy, "a lot of our customers start off with mobile email and migrate to the other applications, so we love Symbian."

For more information on OneBridge and support for Symbian OS devices visit the Extended Systems Web site: www.extendedsystems.com.