This week I had the privilege of presenting at the IESA conference at Coventry University on the future of collaborative technology in construction. This is probably a somewhat grandiose and certainly an open-ended topic; but through our work at Asite I get the benefit of a lot of expertise in our customer base which I tried to pass on.
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Construction IT is a broad remit. However, there is one regularly recurring theme across the breadth of it; and that is the mobile web. This isn't just specific to the construction sector mind you, with BBC News reporting a marked increase in usage levels of mobile internet access and the FT reporting that 16 Million UK users accessed the internet from mobile devices in December 2009; averaging 418 page views and 307 minutes per user. Whilst undoubtedly a great deal of the traffic relates to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, with an inherently mobile workforce the construction industry has a huge amount to gain from the mobile web! We have seen initiatives such as COMIT which have looked at how the sector could benefit from using mobile devices and the benefits in terms of time and efficiency savings are clear. To my mind, until now the problem has been the cost of development of the apps to run on the mobile, which has held back the take-up. So, with this in mind, Asite is very happy to give you a preview of the forthcoming Asite cMOB mobile application. As you can see from the screenshot Asite cMOB is a completely new way of accessing your Asite Workspaces and sharing information with your teams. This information is then available within the main Asite web application and vice-versa meaning mobile and office workers can seamlessly work together in real-time across the globe. |
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Where Asite mobile differs from other existing mobile applications, is that you can design your own apps to run on Asite mobile using our AppBuilder functionality. Once again, we'll be providing some out of the box apps via our AppLibrary (such as Mobile RFIs, Mobile Defects and mobile Goods Receipting for procurement logistics) to get you started, but AppBuilder will allow you to quickly and easily design interfaces to send and receive information between mobile and office based users. Please keep an eye out for announcements regarding the formal launch of Asite cMOB in the next couple of weeks. If you wish to use any of the existing apps or start designing your own apps for Asite cMOB, or would just like a demonstration then please contact your workspace administrator or contact us directly at marketing@asite.com. |