Adobe Steps Up in Enterprise App Development
Adobe is joining the ranks of several other enterprise app development platforms and is aiming to make developing enterprise apps easier. They unveiled Adobe Experience Manager Mobile at Mobile World Congress last week.
“Mobile apps are integral to the enterprise, yet brands struggle with how to build, manage and deliver mobile experiences that consumers have grown accustomed to,” said exec Nick Bogaty in a statement. “Adobe Experience Manager Mobile brings the simplicity, functionality and design that people expect to enterprise apps.”
Last week Bogaty addressed the issues facing enterprise mobile apps in his blog. He compared the issues facing the way we develop enterprise apps to the same issues we faced when developing websites over a decade ago. New technology was introduced then to improve the security, flexibility and usability of websites and the same thing is starting to happen now for mobile apps. Companies like Adobe and Alpha Software are coming up with solutions to remedy this problem and create usable secure apps quickly. Gartner also sees the demand for programs like this and has been reporting on RMAD.
“We think that a similar moment is upon us with mobile apps and today I’m really excited to announce a new product, Adobe Experience Manager Mobile, that will allow enterprises to drastically reduce their time to market while making it easier to attract and engage audiences with compelling, actionable content,” Bogaty said.
“Adobe Experience Manager Mobile treats apps as a first class citizen in the multi-channel content experience, allowing marketing managers and creatives to populate apps with existing content through template-based authoring,” Bogaty said. This way new content doesn’t have to be developed and developers can hand off populating the apps to the people who are going to be using it. By passing of this part of the development process, it frees up developers to work on the back end.
For app creation Adobe is using rapid application development techniques to make app targeting iOS, Android and Windows. “Using intuitive design tools and frameworks, designers and marketers can quickly create beautiful screens and nuanced navigational structures, all backed by native working code,” Bogaty said. “This results in rapid time to market to beat today’s inefficient workflows by 50-70 percent.”
The biggest difference between the average enterprise app and the average consumer app is that consumer apps tend to look better and function more smoothly than enterprise apps. This is because consumer apps depend on their usability and visual appeal in order to become successful. Enterprise apps tend to fall by the wayside in this aspect because security is the more important focus and it takes longer to develop the more complicated settings. Using an RMAD (rapid mobile app development) solution is seem less secure than having a developer build an app back to front, but it isn’t. Solutions like Adobe Experience Mobile Manager are going to help the enterprise app industry take off.
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