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Teamware Mobile end user functionality is provided with applications used both with a mobile device and with a desktop browser. On the mobile device its native e-mail and calendar applications are utilized for basic e-mail and calendar functionality. A number of add-on components are installed on the mobile device to extend the basic functionality provided by the e-mail and calendar client. The Web-based applications used with a desktop browser allow the end user to manage a number of settings and preferences related to Teamware Mobile. The mobile browser is used to access web-based applications such as mobile front-ends to corporate intranet services.
1 E-mail services
Teamware Mobile mail services automatically fetch e-mail messages to the user's mobile device and alerts the user when new messages arrive. The user can define and activate mail filters that filter the messages to user-chosen folders that can be downloaded to the mobile device. Teamware Mobile also takes care of copying messages sent from the mobile device to a user-defined folder in the user's groupware mail system.
Teamware Mobile users find a TW Mail application on the mobile device. TW Mail application provides access to the add-on mail features provided by Teamware Mobile. When the mobile device is restarted, TW Mail automatically restores its previous settings and starts refreshing the mailboxes, if configured to do so.
The use of TW Mail requires that the user has an e-mail account in the mail system that is accessed via Teamware Mobile and has a mobile device that supports remote mailbox access over IMAP4. In addition to TW Mail, the remote mailbox can also be opened by the native mail client. When the user first starts using Teamware Mobile, she needs to create a new mailbox for that account in the mobile device. After the mailbox is created in the mobile device it can be opened by selecting the TW Mail option in the device's main menu.
The main screen of TW Mail displays the mailboxes configured for the mobile mail client. The TW Mail main screen helps the user to see the status of the mailbox(es) easily and quickly. The main screen tells the user whether she has new messages in a mailbox, the time when the latest message arrived, the number of unread messages and whether the automatic refresh setting is on or off. Icons show the status of the messages in a mailbox. The three statuses are:
- The mailbox contains new, unread messages.
- All the messages in the mailbox have been read.
- There are no new messages in the mailbox.
Figure 1. TW Mail main view
The user can open a mailbox directly from the TW Mail main screen by selecting the mailbox and pressing the selection key. The mobile device native e-mail application opens listing the messages. Now the user can select the message for reading, reply to them or send new messages.
When TW Mail is open, the Options menu of the mobile device lists the available TW Mail commands.
TW Mail provides various settings that the user can use to configure the mailbox on the mobile device. The settings include an option to set the automatic refresh on. When this setting is on, TW Mail will notify the user when new messages arrive. The user can select the alert tone for the incoming messages. Messages can have a different alert tone from calendar appointment alerts thus making it easier to distinguish alerts. Alerts are, however, automatically disabled when the phone is set in silent mode. The user can also specify the refresh rate in minutes.
The user can also specify whether she wants to receive the message body text and also the attachments to her mobile device. If these two settings are off, only the message headers will be downloaded automatically to the mobile device.
The TW Mail settings also include a setting for SMTP authentication and service port. When the SMTP authentication is set on, TW Mail uses SMTP authentication when the user sends mail messages from the mobile device. Mail messages sent from the mobile device are copied to the user's groupware mail system to a folder defined by the user making it easy for the user to keep track of the status of sent messages. Mail messages are copied to the groupware mail if the user has set this option on in the Personal User Interface (described in more detail further below).
An easy to use advanced filtering system keeps the user in control of which e-mail messages will be delivered to the phone. Filtering in Teamware Mobile means either copying or moving messages to chosen folders in the background. Filtering is done in the mail server.
The user can create and select filter sets for different purposes such as business trip, time off or time in the office. A Web-based desktop user interface (Teamware Mobile Personal User Interface) is available for creating and modifying mail filters. The Personal User Interface can also be used for defining the preferred order in which the filters are executed and for selecting the filters that are currently in use for the time being. The active filter set can also be changed using the mobile device.
2 Teamware Assistant
Most of today’s advanced mobile devices have calendar, task, and contact applications and a SyncML compliant synchronization client that is capable of synchronizing the mobile application with back-end applications. However, today’s groupware products do not yet provide built-in SyncML compliant synchronization over the wireless Internet. Teamware Mobile provides a synchronization server (Sync Server) that intermediates SyncML-based synchronization between mobile devices and personal calendars, tasks, and contacts that are maintained in groupware systems. It interacts with mobile clients using the SyncML protocol, and accesses the personal calendars in the groupware systems using groupware product specific interfaces and protocols. Furthermore, Teamware Mobile provides a calendar synchronization agent that runs in mobile devices and initiates calendar synchronization automatically, at a user definable frequency (not available in older phone models).
Teamware Mobile calendar services are provided through the Teamware Assistant application. TW Assistant takes care of automated synchronization of calendar, task, and contact data between the groupware calendar server and the calendar application on the mobile device. It provides the user with a listing of new and modified calendar entries. TW Assistant informs the user about a new calendar entry with an audible alert. TW Assistant also shows the calendar entry notes/description field in addition to entry subject and start and end times as well as appointment creator and recipient information.
The TW Assistant application is opened by selecting TW Assistant in the device’s main menu.
Figure 2. TW Calendar lists new and modified calendar entries
The calendar synchronization performs a two-way synchronization of calendar entries between a mobile device and a groupware calendar. Soon after an appointment has been created in the groupware calendar it will be synchronized to the mobile device’s calendar and vice versa. Appointment modifications and deletions are also synchronized.
Figure 3. The entries of the same day in the mobile device calendar and groupware calendar after synchronization.
When TW Assistant is open, the mobile device’s Options menu provides TW Assistant related commands. The user can start the synchronization by selecting the Sync now command from the Options menu. The menu contains commands that allow the user to define other settings such as number of items listed and setting related to automatic synchronization. Synchronization settings include options for synchronization frequency.
The availability and details of the features in contact and task synchronization depend on the functionality supported by the back-end groupware system.
3 Teamware Mobile Personal User Interface
Teamware Mobile Personal User Interface provides a Web-based desktop user interface for customizing e-mail filters, user preferences and a number of other settings. A smaller number of the options in Personal User Interface are also available through the mobile device. Modifications made in the Personal User Interface are maintained in the Teamware Mobile server and they impact the user's mobile access.
Some of the mail settings in Teamware Mobile are managed by the administrator jointly for all mail accounts. The settings that an end user can define include selecting the mailbox for mapping, saving sent messages, and managing filters.
The Mobile Mail settings provided by the Personal User Interface include settings related to inter-operability of the mail client in the mobile device and the groupware mail account and management of mail filters. The mail filters sort messages into chosen folders in the background.
Users can access their messages with the mobile device after the device and IMAP and SMTP servers have been properly configured. Default settings will be used, for example messages are fetched from the groupware mail inbox. In order to use filters and other optional settings the user needs to set her preferences in the Mobile Mail settings. To have mobile access to messages in a folder other than inbox of the groupware mail account a mapping must be specified between the user's remote mailbox and the folder in the groupware mailbox. A typical mobile mail client thinks it reads the inbox folder of the mail account in the back-end mail system and it does not care of what other folders they may be. Because that inbox folder can hold a large amount of messages, Teamware Mobile makes it possible to use the filtering feature to move or copy messages from the inbox to a chosen folder. Teamware Mobile then allows the user to map that target folder to the remote mailbox achieving in this way mobile access to a filtered set of messages.
The Settings tab also allows the user to indicate whether she wants the messages sent from the mobile device to be saved in the groupware mail system and specify the folder. Furthermore, the user can select which of the filters she has defined are in use.
Figure 4. Settings tab of the Personal User Interface provide the user with options to customize the inter-operability of the groupware and mobile mail.
Rules are created, modified and deleted on the Manage filters tab of the Personal Settings. Users can add new filters for different purposes. For example, someone may want to have filters for time she spends on business trips, holidays or time off, and office hours. Another user may want to define different filters for the projects he is working with.
The user can give the rule a name that describes its purpose. Next an action is selected to deal with messages and the target folder to which the messages are processed. The available actions are copy, move, or delete incoming messages and delete messages from selected target folder. Conditions are an important part of a mail rule. The conditions define the criteria used by the rules when they process incoming messages. If a message matches the defined criteria of a rule, the rule action is performed and the message is imported to the mobile device.
A rule can have several conditions if needed. Each condition consists of three components: a message field describing an attribute of a message to which the condition is applied, an operator that is applied to the message field and a selection parameter that is compared to the message field in the way specified by the operator. The message fields available are Subject, Sender, Importance, Status, Whole message size, Text size, Header size, and Date. The operators and accepted parameters vary according to the field. Conditions can be combined either with AND or with OR operator.
Figure 5. Adding a new filter.
Existing rules can be modified or deleted on the Manage rules tab. All attributes of an existing rule can be modified. The user can also order the existing rules. The rules are applied in order from top to bottom if rules have been set on the Settings page. The topmost rule is applied first, and only those messages left in the inbox are passed on to the other rules in the listed order.
The mail-filtering agent of Teamware Mobile compensates for lack of appropriate filtering capabilities in back-end systems. Note that it can be used in addition to or instead of mail filtering features that are provided by back-end mail systems.
The other Teamware Mobile settings that the end user can define in the Personal User Interface include authentication settings, language and locale preferences. The settings related to authentication available to end users are changing the password, selection of the authentication policy and adding new credentials entries from back-end login info. All these authentication settings enable the user or any software agent functioning on behalf of the user to access safely the services available via Teamware Mobile.
The user can save in Teamware Mobile also her pairs for such back-end systems that she accesses via the programs that run in Teamware Mobile. This procedure increases security also in situations when the mobile device is lost, because even if the user saves her Teamware Mobile password in her mobile device, stealing the device and finding out the password from it does not reveal back-end system login names and passwords. In addition, it is possible to block access from a lost device centrally from the Teamware Mobile server.
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