March 17, 1999 Web posted at: 2:11 p.m. EST (1911 GMT) by Ephraim Schwartz

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INTERACTIVE: Has your company tried to adapt its network to accommodate handheld devices? Yes No View Results

(IDG) -- What started as a trickle has turned into a flood of corporate applications for handheld devices, making it increasingly difficult for IT organizations to ignore the handheld computing platform.

Indeed, some companies have had good experiences with deploying handhelds, but many IT managers still believe these devices lack the support and security infrastructure required to be successful in an enterprise environment.

IT managers complain that despite the widespread acceptance of handheld devices in the market for more than three years, tasks as crucial as synchronizing with corporate servers are not easily accomplished.

"We own the desktop, but to get the synchronization software to work has to be a major effort on the vendors' part. We don't want to [devote the] extra staff, and no one has stepped up to the plate," said Bernie Femeau, a systems analyst at State Farm Insurance, in Bloomington, Ill.

"On an experimental basis, companies [Windows CE hardware vendors] gave us their [toll-free] support numbers and we tried that. It was a bust," Femeau said.

Even Microsoft is at a loss, according to Roger Gulrajani, group product manager of Microsoft's consumer appliances marketing team.

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"There isn't WinCE synchronization with servers in calendaring and for contacts. The size of the code that needs to be written on a mobile device is too large," Gulrajani said.

Microsoft is unable to figure out a way to use a standard protocol and keep the size small enough to fit on a WinCE device, according to Gulrajani.

"Ultimately, people want that functionality. IT professionals are going to expect it [to be] going forward," Gulrajani said. However, he made no promise that such functionality would be coming any time soon from Microsoft.

As handheld devices move into the enterprise, another major concern is security.

"I'm not satisfied with the level of security," said Dave Fitzpatrick, director of Information Services at Chateau Ste. Michelle winery, in Woodinville, Wash.

Because of the proprietary nature of the information that resides on the winery's handhelds, "If a PalmPilot is lost or stolen, we are at risk," Fitzpatrick said.

Solutions do exist, but most of them are focused solutions that do not solve the overall headache for IT managers.

However, Certicom offers its Security Builder toolkit that is geared to address those varied security concerns.

"We have proposals in front of 3Com and Microsoft to get our security layer baked right into the platform. That is where the core functionality needs to go," said Rick Dalmazzi, president of Certicom, in San Mateo, Calif.

Despite their apparent shortcomings, IT managers, such as Fitzpatrick, are having success in deploying handhelds and believe there are significant economic advantages.

"By installing PalmPilots at $300 each, we were able to avoid the purchase of laptops at $4,000 each, saving $185,000," Fitzpatrick said.

Fitzpatrick's winery uses Palm systems in the field to record soil conditions and growing status of grape clusters. The company also has plans to use Palm devices as merchandizing tools in retail outlets that sell its products.

In the meantime, Microsoft is addressing numerous other problems that have cropped up since handhelds began their march into corporations.

In two months, the company will offer an upgrade to the WinCE operating system to allow WinCE devices to connect to Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT directly, without using Remote Access Server.

"WinCE is getting its own comm layer," said Jim Floyd, product manager for handheld PCs at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash. "It will make WinCE a lot easier to configure for remote access."

Other companies are also moving forward to make WinCE more usable in the enterprise.

Next month Odyssey Software, in Rochester, N.Y., will announce the enterprise version of its CE Fusion development kit. The new version will support Microsoft's Message Cue Server as well Microsoft's Transaction server. The WinCE support for Transaction Server will allow WinCE devices to access middle-tier business logic in distributed applications.

"Now you make one change to your business logic and it permeates the entire enterprise," said Mark Gentile, president and CEO of Odyssey Software.

This spring, Oracle will release an application called Internet Lite, which will allow corporate developers to create Web-based applications to access Oracle databases. Written with Java, Internet Lite allows users to simultaneously download the database and a browser to a handheld for offline access.

According to Neil Shepherd, senior product marketing manager at Oracle, corporate developers will create programs for salesforce automation, for example, which will allow a mobile salesperson to download the application and database pertinent to that particular territory. It will also allow developers to write Java code that will run on the server as well as on a local machine.

However, because the program requires a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which is currently too large to fit on a handheld, the application awaits support for JVMs on handhelds before it can be deployed in the WinCE or Palm OS operating systems. Currently, Hewlett-Packard and other manufacturers are making a smaller JVM which will fit on embedded devices.

Another enterprise-level ISV, Extended Systems, this month will ship its Enterprise Harmony 99, a single solution for data synchronization with devices running either the WinCE or Palm OS operating systems. The $59.95 program will allow users to synchronize contacts, calendar, tasks, and e-mail with almost all WinCE and Palm OS programs.

Given the flood of programs that are making personal digital assistants more acceptable to business users, many IT managers are struggling to maintain some control over the infiltration of unapproved software.

"It's a question of ethics. We can't stop our users from buying these devices, but we can stop them from putting software on our machines. These are business machines," State Farm's Femeau said.

When a company finally does accept a handheld strategy, even the choice of which device to standardize on can become a major concern.

"When we see 10 to 15 different WinCE devices and three or four Palm devices, we're confused," said Wade Zitzloff, manager at IT mobile solutions at 3M Corp., in Minneapolis. "We tend to want to sit back and wait to see who wins."

Ephraim Schwartz is an editor at large at InfoWorld and has been covering mobile devices for 17 years.