One Response to “Sybase iAnywhere Mobile Software Application – Secure Enterprise Data for the iPhone”

1. Johannes Kristinsson says:

   January 19, 2011 at 21:35

   While the initiative to bring the iAnywhere functionality to the iPhone is greatly appreciated – the implementation could not have been much worse. Sybase, a company which should have enough resources to create high quality products, might have put efforts into the server side of the solution, but at the same time left a disaster for the iPhone clients.

   The software does not follow standard guidelines for iOS HMI which means that the application in many ways behave much differently from other applications. For example – the recommendation is that when a user right-swipes on an item in a list (such as an email) it is an indication to delete the item. iAnywhere interprets this as “open item”.
   There are also logical “quirks” in the application such as showing the local phonebook before a search is done, but when the search is committed, only show corporate results, without explaining the difference for the user.

   Moreover, the synchronization experience is frustrating at least, if not to say horrible. When the application is started it updates the email and calendar in the background, but shows no indication that synchronization is currently being performed, when it was last done, or if the email list is currently up to date. When synchronization between the corporate email server and the iAnywhere solution is down (which happens quite a lot at the very large multinational company I’m working at) there is no indication to tell that the list of emails you see is up to date. More likely than not, this is not the case.

   Finally, the program is full of bugs. It is slow, crashes, shows error messages more often than expected for a program of this sort. Not to mention that the program is capable, and actually have, erased peoples personal contact books (the iPhone built-in one), which is one thing the so praised “sandboxed” approach should have prevented.

   To summarize – the idea to bring a sandboxed enterprise Mail/Calendar/Contact management application to mobile devices is great, but it feels like the iPhone application was developed as a homegrown summer intern project by some manager’s nephew. It is buggy, has logical errors, doesn’t follow iPhone development guidelines, and judging from the kind of errors and catastrophes it has created among our users, lacks a good underlying architecture. Sybase need to put in some adequate resources to release something that is not most closely described as an iPhone App disaster.

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