For those tiny few, and not for the general public....
**** WARNING --- RANT BEGINS --- WARNING ****
If you are one of the few with the time and the geekyness to do this, then go ahead but for me, if any of the locals decided to do this, I would have to be available minute by minute, hour by hour and day by day, for as the old saying going, the more idiot proof something is, they just keep making better idiots. (I think there is a hidden college somewhere that shows them how to excel at this).
This whole business of using mobiles for everything is a disaster in the waiting. You have this shiny toy in your pocket that is supposed to link to the cloud (if you can even get online that is), and everything is stored up there until the cloud has a failure, and they do fail. Plenty of articles on here about that. So now you have lost access to all your emails, documents, diary, etc and have no way of finding out what it is your supposed to be doing unless you have a backup copy stored elsewhere. Now you have to get the phone to connect to that instead and most of Joe Public would not have a clue / idea on how to manage that. You could have it stored locally on the phone, but why then have a cloud if it is "just there" (believe me that is what Joe Public will be thinking and now just imagine what happens if the phone becomes unusable - all there lovely data / information will be lost - read bills, invoices, documents, etc).
Also missing from the equation here, is this shiny toy has to be sturdy enough to withstand the Children (if you have any), the dogs (if you have any), drops, knocks, bruises, visits to the hard surfaces from only who knows what heights, the odd dunking, and the odd time being driven over, and not to mention being lost. And only who knows what could happen to it in the pubs, restaurants, disco's, theaters, airports, seaports, planes, boats, ferries, trucks, cars, bicycles, motorbikes, mountains, lakes, seas, rivers, parks, playgrounds, etc. Do not forget, it is your phone and where you go, it is going to go. So take a look around all the places you go and then tell me that putting all your business on a mobile phone is a "wise" idea.
No thanks, please kept it simple. Phones are for making calls and texts, everything else is just eye-candy and time wasting exercises. Yes you can connect to the cloud, supposedly read and write files (documents, etc) but on the screens most people have, even business guys, not going to happen. For the few that do have large enough screens, it is still not going to work.
If this is the way forward for Joe Public to run his business, then you need to factor in a big dose of idiocy, thickness, stupidity and general pigheadedness. If you do decide to go down this route, you need to make sure that the phone is backed up to the cloud, real-time, the cloud is backed up somewhere else in real-time and that when the phone cannot connect to the cloud you selected, it can automatically fall over to your backup (where ever that is). And if all connectivity is lost, the data has got to be also stored locally. With all of it syncing backup when you do get back online.
You need to make sure that all details are never stored on the phone (unless the security is enabled and enterprise grade which Joe Public cannot afford), but in the cloud and you have to make sure the tablets and PC's are all linked to that because as sure as hell, now that all is on the phone, they will want to do the invoices on the PC. Or if they get a bit bigger and have somebody else join (the business or) in on the fun then all hell breaks loose as now you need to sycn the phones so that everybody knows what it is they are supposed to be doing. Ha ha, good luck on that.
As a marketing exercise, this is just pure BS. Give it maybe 10 years, make sure what is on the phone can connect automatically to both cloud and your own networks with minimum fuss, that phones can "throw" a desktop like experience onto screens with keyboards/mice attachments (without any physical connection from the phone), easily and quickly, and then maybe this might be a possibility as the phone is now just a commodity item that can be lost, broken, destroyed and if the designers / developers have gotten it right, buying a new phone and logging in, would restore all that was on the old phone. Then this can be used by business as their main communication tool. Currently, not happening.
Yes, I know you can (on Android) log into a new phone and all your contacts will be downloaded (those stored in the cloud anyway), (not sure of Google Docs) but for Viber, Dropbox, Skype, ect, you need the userid and password and most people will not know these unless they are written down somewhere. (Never used a Windows Phone or iPhone, so do not know about these). Everything that was on the phone as such is lost, anything on the SD card is gone. Until all this is stored *elsewhere* and backed up, there is just too much of a risk of losing important data. Not happening until we have low cost connectivity, fast low cost connectivity and devices that can store their data locally, automatically backup to the cloud, which can then replicate to another system. Get the redundancy done right, simplicity of setup, then you can do this. Until then, advise all to stick to what they have and use the mobile for what it was originally designed for, making calls and texts.
**** END RANT ****
Biting the hand that feeds IT
