The iPad is an impressive piece of technology. Find out what you need to know so you can get the most out of it as a business tool.
As an Apple iPad owner from the day the first units were delivered to customers, I’ve spent a lot of time finding out how to get the most out of its functionality. I’ve assembled this simple guide, which will serve as an updated work in progress, for those of you who may be new to the iPad and iOS platform and are looking for interoperability solutions.
Calender, Contact and Email Integration
The iPad includes support for a number of different types of calenders and email accounts.
The iPad can support Microsoft Exchange, POP3/IMAP4, GMail, Yahoo, AOL and MobileMe email accounts.
Most business users will want to use Exchange ActiveSync connectivity to synchronise Calender, Mail and Contacts on the iPad.
The Microsoft Exchange (ActiveSync) configuration screen
When using Exchange accounts on the iPad, your company systems administrator will provide you with the login information which includes your domain and hostname of the Exchange server, your email address, your username and password.
Once configured, your Apple iPad will be automatically set up to synchronise your email as well as contacts from your company directory services and your personal address book and also permit synchronisation between your company calendar in Outlook and the iPad’s Calendar application.
The Apple iPad also supports standard POP3 and IMAP4 email accounts through its “Other” account setup wizard option and also supports LDAP-based directory services if your organisation uses them for the Contacts synchronisation.
Professionals who use Web-based services for Calender and Mail such as GMail/Google will need to do some further customisation for iPad integration.
In the case of GMail, you’ll want to forgo the built-in iPad GMail wizard for mail setup and use GMail Exchange Emulation (Google Sync) instead, which provides for synchronization of Calendaring and Contacts in addition to just plain email.
As with GMail accounts, Microsoft Live Hotmail users can now add email, calendaring and contacts support via Exchange emulation (Exchange Activesync). To set up Activesync on your iPad.
Alternatively, Windows Live users might wish to consider mBoxMail, a 3rd-party application for iPad and iPhone which has full support for Windows Live Hotmail folders as well as contacts.
Adding Frequently Used Websites and Bookmark Sync
A nice feature of the iPad is the ability to bookmark frequently used websites directly to the Home Screen. LinedIn, Facebook and the mobile versions of Windows Live, Yahoo and the various Google sites are all useful to have as instant access shortcuts.
To add a home screen shortcut, just click on the “Plus” icon in Safari when viewing any website.
If you have many websites bookmarked in your PC or Mac browser, you can migrate them over to your iPad by using XMarks, a free service which syncs your favorite bookmarks from Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari to the Cloud.
While XMarks bookmarks cannot be synced into the iPad’s Safari directly, you can view them using the Mobile XMarks Website and bookmark it to your Home Screen as shown above. Further to this, XMarks has created a native iOS application which essentially performs the same functions as the mobile XMarks website, but does a synchronisation.
Document Viewing and Data Exchange
One of the most difficult adjustments business users may find when getting accustomed to iOS devices such as the Apple iPad is the closed nature of the device and how to get their documents and data transferred to it.
Unlike a laptop, you just can’t connect a USB stick or a storage card into it and copy files to a directory on the device that any number of applications can directly access. On the Apple iPad, each application maintains its own distinct database and is for the most part isolated from one another. Additionally, the iPad has no native facility for networking with corporate or cloud-based file servers.
Instead, there are a number of programs which can allow you to add this capability in.
The most important of which is a 59p application and should be considered a mandatory download, GoodReader.
Goodreader for iPad supports the viewing of many document formats including PDF and Microsoft Office files, permits direct Wi-Fi transfer of data directly to the iPad, and can connect to a variety of cloud-based storage services.
GoodReader will be the best 59p you’ve ever invested in your iPad. With this seemingly magical application, you can view PDF and a myriad of other data formats including Microsoft Office, HTML, image files as well as audio and video formats. Additionally, you can connect to several popular cloud-based storage services including DropBox (which has its own viewer app but is inferior to GoodReader) WebDAV servers and directly access files stored on Google Docs and within GMail itself.
As if this wasn’t impressive enough, you can also directly transfer files to GoodReader wirelessly using a simple Web-based GUI from your PC or Mac, or via WebDAV-based drag and drop network share.
QuickOffice Connect
Similar to GoodReader is QuickOffice Connect which in addition to viewing a variety of formats including PDF, is capable of actually editing Microsoft Office files and could be considered an office suite for iPad similar to Apple’s own Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps. Like GoodReader, QuickOffice Connect can also act as a WebDAV server and files can be transferred directly to it wirelessly.
A competitor to QuickOffice Connect is Dataviz’s Documents to Go Premium, which advertises similar functionality but also integrates email attachments from the iPad’s Mail app. Documents to Go also includes a wireless sync desktop application that permits PCs and Macs to synchronize with files on the iPad.
Another popular and free application, Memeo Connect, is specifically optimized for reading data stored in Google Docs. While less functional than QuickOffice Connect, Documents to Go and GoodReader, it has an extremely aesthetically pleasing GUI which simulates a desktop folder paradigm and automatically organizes your documents by file type. While not able to edit documents by itself, it is able to import data into QuickOffice, GoodReader as well as Apple’s Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps.
In addition to the above general-purpose reader/viewer apps above, another must-download for the iPad is Stanza, which is technically an E-Book reader but is capable of viewing EPUB files which can be generated by using the Open Source Calibre program for Windows, Mac and Linux. Calibre can read and convert many formats to EPUB which can be uploaded to Stanza.
Additionally, Calibre can act as an OPDS content server to host an entire EPUB library on your PC or Mac, which can be remotely connected to by Stanza. This means you can have tens of thousands of documents stored and indexed on your PC (or your web server/cloud storage service) which you don’t need to upload directly to your iPad, which could potentially cause backup problems.
In addition to OPDS feeds as well as iTunes USB sync, Stanza can also import EPUB files directly from email attachments.
Do you have any more essential iPad advice and software for business users? Reply below and let us know.
Connected business are currently offering all Northern Ireland businesses FREE iPads if they take an appointment with one of our account managers to see if we can offer their company a better deal on their business mobiles.
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