OnSymbian

Quickoffice: Much More Than Just Editing

Quickoffice Inc. has extended its offering with two announcements at the Smartphone Show. These announcements start taking the company beyond supplying just a tool to edit Microsoft documents on a Symbian smartphone. Richard Bloor spoke to Paul Moreton to find out more.

is rapidly transforming itself from a company focused solely on enabling Microsoft Office suite document editing on S60 devices and UIQ phones into a total document solutions provider. It is doing this through cooperation with a company which is new to the Symbian ecosystem, SoonR.

However, the core of its offering is still Quickoffice and at the Smartphone Show Quickoffice Inc. is demonstrating the next version of Quickoffice.

Quickoffice Premier v5 will bring editing for Word and Excel files in the new Microsoft Office 2007 document format to S60 devices by the end of this year. "This is a major milestone for Quickoffice and the first solution to support Office 2007 document editing on S60 devices," says Paul Moreton, vice president of product management at Quickoffice Inc. "It has been a major undertaking; incorporating Microsoft's new XML file formats." Paul says that support for the new document format gives Quickoffice users with the same viewing and editing features provided for the older Office document formats, plus support for some of the new Office 2007 formatting features. "We are also providing our same no data loss technology for Office 2007 documents, so any features we don't support in Quickoffice are preserved when a document is saved," says Paul, who also notes that PowerPoint 2007 document support will be provided in a future release.

Paul is also quick to point out that the current release of Quickoffice Premier v4.5 already outperforms Mobile Office on Windows Mobile 6 Standard. "We support more features and offer significantly better data maintenance than Microsoft's product," says Paul. Paul gives examples such as the ability to create new documents, more advanced editing features, the preservation of data items such as document revision marks and Word drawings, and the fact that Quickoffice Premier v4.5 is much more efficient at opening large files.

In the second announcement Quickoffice Inc. is teaming with SoonR to build client technology, branded as Quickaccess, to facilitate the sharing of documents and other files between a PC and Symbian devices. SoonR already provides its users with the ability to access content on their PC from mobile devices, while the user's PC is on, using a mobile browser. In cooperation with Quickoffice Inc. this capability will be significantly enhanced, with access provided to files on SoonR's server and the ability to view file remotely.

"With Quickaccess smartphone users will be able set certain files or folders on their PC to synchronize with the storage solution hosted by SoonR," says Paul. "This will then allow users to download or view these files on their smartphone. In addition, our technology will synchronize any files modified on the smartphone back to the SoonR service and, when the user turns their PC on, the modified files will be returned to their PC."

The viewing technology will be powered by Quickoffice Inc.'s SVG viewer technology (which is BitFlash technology Quickoffice Inc. licensed exclusively in 2006). The advantage of viewing documents via SVG Tiny (SVGT) on a mobile device is the data transfer requirements. "PowerPoint presentation can be many megabytes in size," says Paul. "By converting the content to SVGT we can highly compress the data, so using this technology we can render a page using just a couple of hundred kilobytes of data; for a document page this can be as little as 3 kilobytes." Another big advantage of SVGT, particularly for PowerPoint slides, is that Quickoffice Inc. can support slide animations and transitions using the animation capabilities of SVGT. This SVG technology will also be used to provide a unified device, SoonR repository, and PC file browser.

Most Symbian devices already have an SVGT viewer (indeed BitFlash is the standard viewer in UIQ) but Paul explained that "using our own viewer means we don't have to worry about the capabilities of the on-device viewer. This will be a cross platform technology so it makes sense to incorporate our viewer so we can deliver a consistent and high quality experience."

The SoonR technology will be released in the first quarter of 2008.

I covered the cooperative approach Quickoffice Inc. is taking to expanding it offering in a recent article discussing the Adobe Reader LE v2.5. The agreement with SoonR extends the cooperation Quickoffice Inc. is undertaking by moving beyond simply implementing a piece of smartphone software. By mobilizing PC data in this way the technology should eliminate the frustration of synchronizing a device with vital files, usually a job rushed while leaving the office. While this will offer significant advantages to individual users and smaller businesses it will be interesting to see if Quickoffice Inc. can leverage Quickaccess into the enterprise space, where there are already a number of synchronization and remote access specialists.

The Embedded Software Challenge

A recent survey by Accenture found that most of the challenges facing smartphone manufacturers, and all companies creating devices using embedded software, go far beyond the core software.

According to A. J. Gupta, Accenture's managing director for Product Innovation and Product Lifecycle Management within the company's Embedded Software Solutions practice, an increasing number of products are migrating their features to software. "We are seeing it in everything from phones to cars," says A. J. "Software is becoming the product differentiator."

An electrical engineer by training, A. J. is based in Washington, U.S. His background was in control systems for jet engines and he contrasts that starkly with today's embedded software industry. "When I talk to my colleagues in the aerospace industry, they are astonished when I tell them that a typical embedded software project has ten times the code they are used to dealing with, but has to be delivered in a tenth of the product lifecycle," says A. J. "As such we cannot underestimate the challenges facing those creating embedded software platforms or devices based on them."

In the recent report "The Embedded Software Industry: Challenges and Successes," Accenture reviewed some of the issues faced by the companies relying on embedded software for their products. In candid responses, Accenture found that 88% believed their testing was poor, 81% work poorly with their suppliers, and over half admitted they shipped products late.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, according to A. J., manufacturers building devices on Symbian OS face the same challenges as any company in the embedded software space. "When I talk to our teams working with Symbian OS, the issues discussed tend to be the same as those pre-occupying other Accenture teams and our clients across the entire embedded software sector."

These issues are diverse, from the architecture of software components through to how to manage the diversity of component suppliers involved in creating software components for a device.

If there is one core element to these issues, A. J. believes it is industrialization. "There is still too much software created in an environment where the work is seen as craftsmanship or artistic in nature," says A. J. "The increasing complexity of embedded software means it needs to be industrialized to make the process predictable and reduce rework."

Industrialization also becomes more important in light of two trends within the embedded software industry; the increasing number of suppliers contributing software to projects and the use of development shops in low cost countries.

A. J. believes that Accenture's track record in systems integration can benefit its customers when it comes to the technical challenges created by multi-vendor projects. At the same time, Accenture's management consulting experience helps with the business challenges. A. J. also sees the fact that Accenture counts many of the major telcos among it clients as a big advantage, allowing the company to offering insight into the requirements demanded by the phone manufacturers' customers.

Industrialization is also key to realizing the benefits of moving software development to low cost countries. "We see many companies looking to low cost countries to reduce their software costs. When they do they often find that the contact cost is only part of the picture," says A. J. "It's not uncommon to find multi- billion dollar companies using small, off-shore shops to reduce costs, only to find that low cost also means their supplier does not have the project management and quality assurance skills necessary to realize the cost savings. More often than not, these companies spend the saving on ferrying their staff to and fro to keep deliveries to time and quality."

Using low cost development not only requires robust management practices to realize the benefits; it also needs the right approach to software design. A. J. points to a recent project where Accenture was asked to help a company that is building software on Symbian OS.

"We were originally approached to help this company find the best approach to moving software development off-shore," says A. J. "At first it appeared to be a classic management consulting gig, but eventually it became more about software architecture as our work highlighted the fact that this company's software needed architectural upgrading. There was no modularity, an essential feature to enable our client to efficiently move parts of its development to a low cost center."

A. J. also highlights a fascinating conundrum for the embedded software industry. "Most manufacturers are taking a platform approach to embedded software," says A. J. "However a platform approach also builds in certain costs. This creates a challenge for manufacturers: how to make this approach work when addressing the global market. On the one hand they have high volume, price sensitive markets in emerging markets, such as India and China; on the other hand they have to address feature sensitive markets in the US and Europe."

A. J. believes the skills offered by Accenture can help companies working with Symbian OS address many of these challenges. "Symbian OS is a critical component in enabling phone manufacturers to deliver quality products in a timely fashion," says A. J. "It provides the essential standard platform on which to build products. However, effectively using Symbian OS requires a range of skills: product engineering, project and supplier management, integration, and user interface design, to name a few. At Accenture we have these skills and expect to be applying them to an increasing number of Symbian OS based projects in the future."

Accenture will be taking this message to the wider Symbian community at next week's Smartphone Show. For more information see www.accenture.com and www.symbiansmartphoneshow.com.