Anyone know of any plans for mobility of Newforma Project information?

I currently have a situation in which one of my users would like to take contacts out of Newforma and place them in public folders in Outlook.  This is pretty much the opposite direction we would like to head.

So when I asked why, they said that they need to be able to access contacts while traveling with a handheld device. (Treo, iPhone, etc.)

I tried doing this by going through the InfoExchange but it is way too difficult to navigate with a handheld.  The users won’t go for it.

Has anyone dealt with this?

Are you entering and managing the contact information directly in Project Center?

We manage all of our contact information in our external Deltek Vision CRM system and then sync the Project Center teams with the contact info from Vision.  So, for handheld access to contact info, we send the users through a gateway that accesses Vision directly.

I’ll have to let someone from Newforma answer the question of whether or not there are plans to integrate this type of mobile access directly into Project Center.

Matt

Currently we are entering the contacts by hand.  Eventually we are planning on integrating our Deltek Vision system in, but our project setup process is fairly customized and we will have several things to rework.

Thanks for the info Matt.

Hi, I am also in search of an answer… does anyone know of a good way for mobile access to Newforma?  Any way?  I was traveling to a meeting and found that I needed to look up an email about the location… unfortunately the message was no longer in my Outlook inbox, since I had filed it in Newforma.  I don’t know of any way to search the archived emails from a mobile device (in my case iPhone, but could also be Treo, Blackberry, etc).  Any suggestions would be appreciated (esp since quite a few people in my office use iphones!).  Thanks!

I’ve had a lot of questions about remote accessing emails during our deployment.  My answer: don’t file emails that you need to access remotely.  If it is still an active item, then keep it in your Outlook inbox.  Use Newforma to archive old emails.  Don’t push every email their automatically - that creates work.  This approach is true for people who want to access remotely and for people who will be working at their desk.

I propose an alternative solution, with the blackberry in mind.

In my office, we previously had Outlook filing options set up for emails to go to the Deleted Items folders, in specific project folders, with the related sent project emails filed in the same location. 

The problem with that is that Blackberry does not sync the Deleted Items folder.

No problem, just create another folder in your Inbox (say, “Projects”), and use the same options noted above. 

Then, on your blackberry, in your Message Options, General Options, change the number of days your blackberry keeps emails (last option.  Mine is currently set to keep cached 30 days worth of email, which to me is a comfortable number (if I need something that fast in the field, it most likely happened within the last 30 days, and my blackberry can handle that amount of email memory).  But you can choose between 15 days and forever. 

The caveat is that you will have to manually delete filed emails from your computer’s Outlook - no big deal, do it once a month or whenever your IT admin complains of your account being too large.

This solution resolves the issue of filing emails into Newforma appropriately (vs. them sitting in your Inbox), while still having access to a decent recent incoming and outgoing set on your blackberry.