The iPad and the Extranet

Well the iPad 2 is out. Queues are forming outside shops as word of shipping delays and product shortages spread. It seems to be that demand for tablet devices just keeps getting stronger and stronger and yet they’re not even fully fledged computers? They are difficult to write on, spreadsheets are fiddly and there is very limited local storage. My iPad filled up long ago with photos and music leaving me having to make a choice which albums and photo’s to exclude from the obligatory iPad to iTunes syncing process. It’s okay, a friend recently observed, surely you can just put an SD card in and expand the storage. Nope. Neither there is an SD card slot, but even if there were, iPads don’t really have a file system to speak of so there would be no way to access it.

iPads, iPhones and the like do of course have an underlying file system otherwise how would they work, but the point is that there is no typical way to browse the contents of your device, no standard ‘My Documents’ folder. There are other limitations too, such as the inability to plug in peripherals via USB cable (no USB slots). However none of these prevent the iPad, or the impending avalanche of Android, Blackberry and HP WebOS devices, from providing a productive and enjoyable computing experience.

In fact, here at project-extranet we think the devices are compelling because of their limitations, not in spite of them. The world is changing, software is moving online and data is being freed from the device. Collaboration software, exactly like project-extranet, is now the file system for your business; available to any of your devices, be they historic platforms like Windows or Mac OSX, or one of the new breed such as iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry or,  to really show that this is the future, devices running the upcoming Google Chrome OS, essentially nothing more than a web browser with a keyboard.

These new devices offer a much simpler computing experience, and for simpler, you can also read cheaper. Cheaper to buy, cheaper to maintain; they don’t really go wrong, catch viruses or get corrupted system files, and if they do, they are essentially disposable items. Your business is safely stored in the project-extranet cloud, and your other business apps are either other online applications or can be reinstalled by visiting the appropriate app store.

We’re not there yet though. Traditional computing platforms still dominate, but the queues in the streets of London and the wave of new platforms show that this revolution is underway.

Right from the start we have been designing project-extranet to be a part of this march to ubiquitous computing, offering core functionality useful to any business as well as the ability to expand the extranet via your own bespoke extranet apps, and we will continue to enhance and improve the extranet as this new IT business model develops.

So here at project-extranet, we love the iPad, especially for it’s limitations!
Gerry