An investigation on how isMobile could use SyncML

Abstract: This thesis work was done for isMobile, which is a Luleå based company with
the business idea of helping companies with a mobile workforce to schedule
and utilize their resources to the fullest. The goal with the work was to
investigate what usages isMobile might have for the synchronization
protocol SyncML. The workload was split up into three areas of
investigation:

1. Investigation of the possibilities to make a software SyncML solution
similar to isMobile’s Blå Pocket but used mainly on cellular phones instead
of handheld computers andif so would be the case, make a prototype.

2. Investigation of the possibilities of device management with SyncML.

3. Investigation about solutions for handling report delivering from phones
if point number one
proved successful.

With the workload distributed in the same order.
We chose to use a software called Funambol for the two first areas.
For the first one we used the Funambol data synchronization server to which
we constructed and added our own plugin to make it work together with
isMobile's software. We ran into some troubles though, the biggest one
being that our solution did not work with as many different phone models as
we had hoped for. There were two causes of this problem, one being that
Funambol did not work well with some models and the second being that
software of different phone models worked differently. Because of these
problems we felt that our solution was not good enough in its current state
but we offered some suggestions on how it might be improved.
For the second one we investigated the possibilities with the Funambol
device management server, being the only open source alternative that we
could find. We never managed to get it to work fully though. Because of
this we had to settle with the conclusion that the SyncML device management
protocol itself seemed to be a good option for device management, based on
its capabilities. However we can not say if there are satisfactory solutions
implementing it today.
For the report delivering part of the thesis work we made two theoretical
suggestions on solutions, one using the SyncML synchronization and the
other using a JSP-page, with the second one being our recommendation at the
current time.