Sensebyte’s Super Apps launch businesses into the mobile era with BlackBerry APIs

BlackBerry DevCon Americas Speaker

COM25 – How One Latin American Company Used BlackBerry to Mobilize its Field Service Team
Join us for an engaging session about an innovative Latin American company that has successfully integrated the BlackBerry® solution into their field service team.

Bryan Tafel, Mobile IT Director with Sensebyte Mobile

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Since 2004, Sensebyte Mobile® (Sensebyte) has recognized the need to mobilize business processes. The company develops mobile applications that are designed to improve workflow and software automation, while helping customers navigate through a wide variety of SAP business services.

Bryan Tafel, Sensebyte Mobile’s IT Director, discusses the company’s use of the BlackBerry® Application Platform and its unique integration with BlackBerry smartphone features and functions, as well as leveraging BlackBerry® Enterprise Server and why their partnership with Research In Motion® (RIM®) has been so important.

How does Sensebyte utilize the native features and functions of BlackBerry smartphones?
The “Super App” experience that the BlackBerry Application Platform enables makes a real difference. We develop our corporate-focused applications using a number of APIs that integrate with the native features of the BlackBerry smartphone and leverage the BlackBerry® Push Service. These features, combined with the security of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, allow the user a more enriched mobile experience.

Do you have a specific example of using the BlackBerry solution to help optimize business processes?
Of course. One example is the background thread, which is designed to allow us to take all of the information that needs to be sent on the server side and send it on a separate thread from the main process where the user is interacting with the application. The information that needs to be sent is held in the background, until we see that the screen has turned off or the application is running in the background. This helps to prevent the app from slowing down, and it greatly improves the user experience – and we can do it with just one line of code.

You mentioned the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. How important has it been in the development of your custom business applications?
All of our corporate applications are compatible with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. This definitely makes our life really easy because it allows the IT staff to deploy applications remotely. Security is also a huge consideration. With some other operating systems, the user needs to have the SKUs to connect to a VPN from a mobile device and that’s difficult. With BlackBerry smartphones, that’s already part of the solution, so the user doesn’t need to take those extra steps.

What about leveraging other features on the BlackBerry platform?
We have two applications (ClubMobile and CouponMobile) running on BlackBerry® Messenger 6 (BBM™ 6). Integrated with the BlackBerry® Messenger SDK (BBM™ SDK), it’s a simple business application that is designed to allow you to share content freely and even recommend the application to others. The BlackBerry platform offers us so many advantages compared to other mobile platforms.

You are currently creating BlackBerry PlayBook tablet apps. Tell us about your experience developing for the tablet?
We’re working hard on a BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet application because we’d like to expand on our success with BlackBerry smartphone apps. When you already develop with Java®, it’s very easy to use those skills to cross over and develop with Adobe® AIR®, which is built on the Adobe® Flash® platform. Our experience enables us to use tools like Adobe Flash, Adobe® Flex®, and Adobe® ActionScript®, which are all simple languages compared to the other programming languages available. And the various Adobe tools simply allow us to give the user the rich visual experience that they have come to expect, especially while using the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

Thanks for your time, Bryan! Developer’s Blog readers, be sure to check out Sensebyte in theBlackBerry App World™ storefront.

Source: RIM