I’ve Got a Cheat Sheet to Help Migrate Your Win32 Apps

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There’s a cheat sheet to rapidly and cheaply migrate Win32 desktop #apps to touchable, #mobile #Windows laptops, convertibles and #tablets.

If your Win32 migration path happens to take you to new, touchable PC hardware running more recent versions of Windows, I have a nice shortcut for you. One of the great hallmarks of Windows over the years is the notion of long-term, backwards compatibility so that customers can continue to use their apps through successive versions of the operating system. This is why your Visual Basic 6 app “just works” on Windows 10. This is good news and is why global business still runs on Windows. In our mobile-first world, you should be looking to make those Win32 apps less dependent on a mouse and keyboard by pivoting toward touch-first interaction. If you don’t have the time, money or resources to rewrite those apps for the new Windows Runtime, I have a book for you titled, “Keeping Windows 8 Tablets in Sync with SQL Server 2012.”

The strategy of this book allows you to keep using your existing codebase while making some easy changes to the UI. If you want to give your users an immersive experience, there are a number of screen elements you can modify or eliminate that will do the trick. It’s also important to dramatically increase the size of the fonts and every UI and navigation element so they’re touchable and readable from any angle. This is such a big topic that I wrote whole a book on the subject. Go check out this book on Amazon if this scenario applies to you.

Improve user productivity and reduce company expenses by migrating to modern Windows platforms through simple UI modifications to existing apps that leave business logic intact. How quickly is your company migrating it’s legacy apps from the 90s?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”Book Cover

Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Convert Your Confusing Win32 Apps to Touch-First Mobile Apps

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Migrate confusing Win32 apps with tiny controls to touch-first #mobile apps with large fonts and UI elements while including gesture support and proper spacing.

The advent of a mouse connected to every computer gave users a pixel-precision pointing device. Coupled with ever-growing computer monitors and higher resolution screens, UI elements got smaller and smaller. This wasn’t a problem until mobile devices with their small screens became popular. The developers that crammed lots of small buttons and data grids on big PC screens brought those bad UI habits to mobile.

At first, these new mobile developers got away with it because personal digital assistants (PDAs) like the Palm, Handspring, Zaurus and Pocket PC used a stylus with plastic, resistive touch screens. Until the touchable iPhone was released in 2007, many smartphones used a stylus as a replacement for the mouse’s precision pointing. This facilitated tiny, touchable UI elements that were hard to see.

When developing today’s mobile apps (native + web), touchable UI elements like buttons must be finger-friendly and at least 44 x 44 pixels in size. To prevent the “fat-finger” problem, they must also be at least 20 pixels apart from each other. This will vary based on screen size and pixel density. Implementing responsive design principles is also a must. UI elements must scale smoothly to different smartphone and tablet screen sizes and support gestures like swiping. They must also reorient themselves when a device shifts between portrait and landscape and implement “hamburger” menus to conserve screen space.

Improve user productivity by creating touchable apps that are easy to use to get employees up and running while reducing training requirements and expenses. What is your organization doing to improve app productivity?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

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It’s Time for one Mobile Database to Rule Them All

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Migrate Win32 applications using a mobile #database like FoxPro, dBase, Access and #SQL Server Compact to #SQLite across all #mobile devices.

If it weren’t for desktop databases and learning SQL, my career as a developer may never have launched. I learned dBase for DOS in college, moved on to Paradox when Windows arrived on the scene and then fell in love with Access. I want to take this moment to say “I’m sorry” to all the IT departments that watched in horror as workgroup-level Access databases spread like wildfire on NetWare, Windows for Workgroups and NT servers to take over the corporate world. Employees who weren’t developers or DBAs were empowered to build their own solutions.

When devices for the mobile enterprise arrived in the late 90s and early 2000s, new databases like Sybase SQL Anywhere and Microsoft SQL Server Compact picked up where their desktop forbearers left off. These tiny relational engines brought serious business apps to life with built-in data sync with server databases. Today, platforms like iOS, Android and Windows are the biggest game in town and the only mobile database that runs on all of them is SQLite. From a pragmatic standpoint, this open source, cross-platform database with ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) support should be your choice to give enterprise mobile data apps the broadest reach. Don’t worry about SQLite just being the database flavor of the week. It supports SQL-92 and works with most programming languages. It has a public domain license and has been around since the year 2000. It also happens to be the most widely deployed database in the world.

Improve user productivity and increase revenue by using a mobile database that works with every device and keeps your apps working with or without connectivity. Which desktop, mobile or embedded databases are you currently using?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Keep your Mobile Data Safe when Apps Talk to Each Other

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Convert Win32 applications using local interprocess communications (IPC) to #mobile #apps that securely send #data to each other via contracts.

In the 90s, platforms and programming languages allowed developers to call functions that were increasingly farther away from the calling code. Calling into subroutines gave way to instantiating classes to call functions. Calling exported functions in separate C DLLs gave way to using Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to call functions in separate programs. You could even embed the UI of a different program like Excel inside your app.

Developers went nuts with this stuff and started calling functions or passing messages to other local apps using Named Pipes, Mailslots, shared databases, TCP, UDP, message queues and shared files. On Windows Mobile, point-to-point queues were used with multiple executables to get around app memory limits. The problem with IPC is that security took a back seat and apps were just asking to be hacked as they listened for incoming connections like little web servers.

Today’s modern mobile platforms don’t allow this. Platforms require things like contracts, intents and extensions. They declare API interactions and what information can be shared between two apps as well as the files they can open. Users are prompted to give their permission to this type of interaction between apps which prevents data leakage at the device edge.

Reduce risk to your business by migrating your apps to a more secure method of data sharing between app sandboxes. What is your organization doing to secure app data sharing?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Make your Apps More Personal and Contextual or Risk Losing Customers

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Awaken those one-dimensional, client/server applications to all the #sensors found on #mobile devices that make them richly personal.

The desktop apps of the 90s could really only sense mouse clicks. While they could communicate over dial-up modems, those apps were unable to discern the world around them until smartphones arrived and became the most personal computing platform ever. Sensors helped make smartphones disruptive and they will do the same for all the apps you’re migrating:

  • Barometer: Apps can detect elevation or changing weather conditions
  • Camera: Apps can take photos, videos, scan 2D/3D barcodes and authenticate via facial recognition
  • Microphone: Apps can respond to commands via Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, or Google Now
  • Accelerometer: Apps can measure steps, switch from portrait to landscape, respond to device position, and control in-app, game or drone behavior
  • Magnetometer/Compass: Apps know direction
  • Gyroscope: Apps can detect movement
  • GPS: Apps know where you are and how to get you where you’re going with maps
  • Proximity: Apps change behavior when your phone is close to something
  • Bluetooth: Apps can pair with other devices, stream audio and respond to beacons
  • Wireless radios: Apps can connect to anything
  • Fingerprint scanner: Apps can authenticate users biometrically and authorize purchases

Improve user experience by taking advantage of sensors that help employees and customers complete tasks more quickly. What is your company doing to enrich its mobile apps?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Your Win32 Apps are Broken so Break them Up to Improve Employee Productivity

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Replace your large, complex, monolithic Win32 #apps that still provide #business value with multiple, single-purpose #mobile apps.

I was involved in the architecture and development of some really large systems for some of the world’s largest companies. The user interfaces for all these systems had hundreds of screens. People with various job functions, from multiple departments, looking for different outcomes might all use the same app. These massive systems tried to be all things to everyone. Employees working in multiple departments found themselves using the same giant app despite never interacting with similar screens or workflows to perform their jobs. Expensive, time-consuming training was always required.

Mobile doesn’t work this way. Users expect apps to perform discrete tasks for a specific set of users. This increases efficiency while reducing confusion and training requirements. Mobile users will reject a 400 screen app on their smartphone. This means you won’t be successful turning a giant desktop app into a giant mobile app. Analyze those large, monolithic apps and see where you can break them apart along lines of functionality, users to be served, and tasks to be accomplished. Your analysis may reveal that some of those apps should be broken into dozens, or more, mobile apps to keep things simple and your employees productive.

Improve user productivity by making apps easier to use and eliminate training to reduce expenses by breaking complex apps into multiple, simple apps. What is your organization doing simplify apps for its employees?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Reduce Business Risk by Migrating your Legacy Software to Modern, Secure Platforms and Programming Languages

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Businesses drag their feet when mobilizing line of business #apps via legacy #software migration thinking it’s cheaper to maintain a codebase than to rewrite for #mobile.

I get it. Migrating all those apps to mobile seems like eating the proverbial elephant. They cost a lot of money to build, the highly-skilled developers needed to rewrite the code are harder to find than ever, the code isn’t commented and there aren’t any docs. This often leads to IT decision makers putting off these projects, perhaps until it’s not their problem anymore. So why do it?

For starters, your employees will be significantly more productive running your apps on the mobile devices they actually use. Since work is not a place to go but a thing to do, employees can get their jobs done from anywhere. Millennials won’t be chained to a desk and they’re going to use the devices they like best. Face it, those Win32 apps are never going to run on someone’s iPhone and your new generation of employees haven’t ever heard of Windows 95. Not changing is a non-starter as you’ll just miss out on younger talent entirely.

Another good reason migrate all these apps and systems is because they’re running on outdated hardware and software. It goes without saying that this infrastructure has far surpassed its end of life (EOL) and there is absolutely no support coming from the original vendors of the computers, operating systems, software and development tools. I’m actually not 100% correct on this point. There are some giant technology vendors that charge tens of millions of dollars per year to support old systems that reached EOL without migrating. In the end, migrating is significantly cheaper and it rescues your valuable intellectual property from fragile, unsupported, failing systems.

There’s a more ominous reason to migrate your apps. Most data breaches are due to running unpatched, out-of-date, and therefore unprotected software. This includes:

  • Software written before PCs were pervasively open to Internet attacks.
  • Apps that don’t require authentication.
  • Apps that don’t encrypt data at-rest or data in-transit.
  • Apps written before established secure development lifecycle procedures.
  • Un-patched software.
  • Software oblivious to buffer overflows or SQL injection attacks.
  • Software and services built with the assumption that they would always be “inside the firewall” and therefore protected.
  • Apps that don’t follow “least privilege” principles.
  • Apps that don’t work with modern sandboxed operating systems.

This older and often unattended software is putting your company at risk. Individual and state-sponsored hackers are attacking the software of companies all over the world. Valuable intellectual property and sensitive customer data is being stolen daily. Company executives are getting fired. You absolutely don’t want this to be your priceless intellectual property or your customer data. This is a fast ticket to losing your competitive advantage as well as the trust of your customers. Oh, and you might be looking for a new CEO and CIO.

So what’s the game plan?

  • Catalog all your Win32 and Web 1.0 apps and assemble a v-team to take ownership of them.
  • Send out surveys to all your employees to find out who’s still using which apps.
  • Utilize asset management discovery software that scans the company network searching for apps running on Windows, Macs and servers.
  • Pull the plug on apps that don’t show up in a survey or via asset management scanning.
  • Listen carefully for screaming employees and turn those apps back on. I expect you’ll find a good percentage of those apps aren’t used anymore.
  • Eliminate the next chunk of apps by seeing if employees can use a new or different process to accomplish certain tasks. Your business and processes may have changed so much over the years that some of these apps aren’t relevant.

When rewriting the remaining apps, focus less on the code and more on data sources, workflows, user interfaces, performance and latency. I’ll talk later about new ways to connect to data and build new apps. It’s more important to reverse-engineer the way employees perceive these apps to work than how the existing code actually makes them work. This provides a good opportunity to stealthily update business cases.

Reduce risk to your company by migrating unsafe, unsupported, end of life software to modern, secure platforms and programming languages. How rapidly is your company de-risking its exposure to legacy business applications?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Improve Employee Productivity by Moving your Win32 and Web 1.0 Apps to Mobile

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It’s time to migrate the millions of Win32 and #Web 1.0 apps that currently run global business to #mobile.

Global businesses are run primarily by Windows applications built in the 90s. While apps were created for DOS, the Apple II, OS/2, Sun Workstations, Win16, NeXT, SGI and the Mac in the 80s and early 90s, most were migrated after Windows NT/95 arrived. Y2K taught us COBOL on mainframes are still around. The larger mega-trend stemmed from low-cost PCs coupled to a graphical operating system working with minimal RAM and slow processors. Combined with drag and drop GUI development tools, a perfect storm took over the world of business. The resulting Win32 apps drove a tidal wave of productivity and innovation. Companies still have thousands of them in use today.

Something else happened in the 1990s. A giant network of networks called the Internet, combined with Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, to create the next technology revolution. Web servers arrived and businesses created static web pages to establish a presence on the web and start marketing to customers. The Intranet was born with internal-facing web pages used to disseminate information to employees. Server-side data processing gave rise to Web 1.0 apps that didn’t have to be deployed to employee desktops the way Windows apps did.

The Win32 and Web 1.0 apps are still with us and must urgently evolve to fit in a world where untethered people expect to flexibly work anytime, from anywhere with mobile devices instead of desktops.

Improve user productivity by migrating legacy apps and websites to the mobile devices employees and customers actually use. What is your organization doing to unchain its employees from desktop apps?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Reduce Risk to Your Business by Ensuring Your EMM Package can Block Malicious Apps

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To prevent malicious apps from attacking corporate assets, get an #EMM solution that disables #mobile #app stores while blacklisting and whitelisting apps.

Despite what you’re thinking, malicious apps may be one of the biggest threats your mobile enterprise will face. You might believe that device encryption, the use of a PIN to logon and utilizing a VPN to connect to your corporate network means your safe. You’re not.

Within the security envelope your device has created, a rogue app could still drive a truck through your VPN tunnel and attack internal assets. Users routinely download apps without paying attention to the list of permissions and capabilities the app is asking for. They can’t be bothered. What could possibly go wrong with the simple drawing app that somehow needs network access and the ability to read your contacts?

While it’s the job of your company’s mobile COE to vet apps used by employees for work, it’s good to have a backup plan. When performing due diligence on EMM packages for your company, make sure blacklisting and whitelisting are supported to prevent users from downloading objectionable apps. Additionally, EMM packages must prevent rogue apps from launching in the event an employee has already downloaded it. To ensure employees can only use a curated, internal enterprise app store, the ability to disable access to public app stores may also be a requirement. Clearly, this flies in the face of BYOD and some employees may reject having this functionality on their device. Containers may be better in some cases.

Protect corporate systems and reduce risk to your company by blocking apps containing code that can inflict harm. What is your organization doing to protect itself from malicious apps unwittingly downloaded by employees?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Reduce Corporate Expenses by Configuring Devices and Delivering Apps to Users with MDM

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When you’re ready to deploy #apps or provision Wi-Fi, certificates, VPN or email to #mobile devices, get an #EMM solution to provide #MDM.

With the basics of device-level security and policy enforcement covered by Exchange ActiveSync, you’re ready to take the next step in providing value to your employees. Extending access to PIM, delivering apps to devices and provisioning functionality over the air was the reason the earliest mobile device management (MDM) packages were built. I should know since I co-founded the first cloud-based MDM company back in 2003. The space has broadened significantly and is now referred to as enterprise mobility management (EMM) with an evolving set of features. The MDM component of EMM delivers:

  • Support for the most widely used mobile operating systems
  • Software lifecycle management that deploys, upgrades and retires apps
  • Operating system configuration management that enforces the IT policies applied to devices, monitors compliance and provides auditing
  • Simplifies users’ lives by provisioning pre-configured settings for email, VPN, Wi-Fi and certificates via profiles
  • Asset management and usage of devices and apps
  • Telecom expense management
  • Service management and remote helpdesk support capabilities
  • Scalability to support hundreds of thousands of devices

Reduce your expenses and improve user productivity by remotely configuring devices and delivering apps to users without needing additional support staff. What is your organization doing do help employees configure their mobile devices and get the apps they need?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!