How Important Is Cross-Platform Support To Your Productivity Solutions?
To increase worker productivity, companies are now making common business applications available for use on multiple platforms. For example, most office workers now have access to their corporate email right on their personal phones. But much more software, including workflow solutions, conferencing applications, and document viewers are now accessible on both employer-provided and personal devices.
Company and Employee Impact
The benefit to companies that offer access to applications and solutions on multiple platforms is clear – what once needed to be done while sitting at a desk working on a PC, can now be done virtually anywhere on any connected device. The corporate world has moved from “9-to-5” to “24/7” and from desktop-only to mobile access thanks to this kind of diverse platform support. What used to have to “wait until Monday” or “wait until I’m back in the office” can now get done immediately – for better or for worse.
What is the result of this always-available mindset? The overall impact on employees operating within these environments isn’t necessarily positive. Easy access, at any time of day, whether in or out of the office, can give workers freedom to adjust their schedules to better meet the needs of both personal and business commitments, but that same flexibility can lead to company expectations that employees should always be available or to employee guilt for not immediately attending to work items in the evening or on a weekend.
The pros and cons of worker impact can be debated and, I suspect, vary greatly between organizations. But the positive impact on company productivity cannot be argued – giving employees multiple endpoints to interact with company systems can help employees to get their tasks done at a highly increased rate.
Multiple Platform Support, but Without Parity?
What is intended to increase employee output may end up being counter-intuitive to use and lower productivity.
Consider an application that lets a user preview Microsoft Word documents on different devices but presents the same document differently depending on the platform in use. The documents look one way in the PC app, another in the browser app and a third way within a mobile app. If this sounds far-fetched, it isn’t – the images below show the same document, with the same popular business document sharing solution, on three different platforms:?
How confusing it would be to discuss this document with your peers, if you were all looking at it on different platforms! Even if you were the only one trying to review the document, if you are using your iPhone, you will have a tough time making progress.
What’s going on in this example?
Multiple Platforms Support, With Full Functionality
It is time for software developers, application vendors and solution providers to stop treating non-desktop platforms as afterthoughts. Simply offering defeatured versions of what is available on the desktop is no longer enough. Getting by with the minimum isn’t going to get productivity to its maximum.
领英推荐
When using a web browser to access content, it should no longer be OK to throw up a message stating that things work better in the desktop app. When using a mobile app, it can no longer be assumed that things are just not going to work as well as they would on the desktop. As users increasingly depend on non-desktop platforms to get their jobs done, solutions for those platforms need to keep up. Cross-platform solutions need to offer a unified approach to user interaction and feature sets on different devices before productivity gains can be fully realized.
DirectOffice Consistency Across Platforms
Qualcomm? DirectOffice? SDK is a format conversion toolkit built to convert Office documents to other formats that are easier to display – images and PDFs. It is meant to enable any application that allows sharing of Office documents – for example, email, workflow, or storage apps – to convert those documents to easily-displayed formats like images or PDFs, regardless of what operating system or device type is being used.?
In the above DirectOffice example, the output is identical across all three user interfaces. This is possible because DirectOffice is designed for optimal portability between environments. The DirectOffice solution is written in a single programming language and then automatically ported and packaged as a library for use on any supported platform. Only DirectOffice uses this patented technology to port to multiple environments, ensuring no lag time in deploying across platforms.?
DirectOffice SDK Ease of Integration
DirectOffice is designed to be deployed across different operating systems and architectures. The DirectOffice conversion library and API are packaged for use in different environments, but the core conversion itself is the same. This greatly reduces the learning curve for developers that are integrating DirectOffice into solutions intended to run on multiple platforms. Once the developers have integrated it for one environment, the other platforms can be managed the same way. The functionality provided by DirectOffice can be made available on all endpoints supported by a software solution, with minor impact to development time.??
Want to Know More?
Qualcomm’s DirectOffice?Document Conversion Software can help ensure your solution includes a great Office file viewing experience, regardless of platform. Office documents can be accurately viewed virtually anywhere they may be found. The table below includes other feature advantages of DirectOffice:?
If you are interested in knowing more about how DirectOffice can help your software achieve real parity across different platforms, you can check out the product page Qualcomm’s?website. You can?contact me here, if you’d like to talk directly.