Mobile document access

Mobile document access (MDA) is a methodology by which a mobile computer such as a cell phone or PDA, can retrieve, store, and otherwise access electronic documents and/or images of paper documents not specifically created for a mobile computing device. The term has some overlap with the concepts of Mobile content, Content Management Systems and Data conversion, and sometimes utilize the Mobile Web.

Overview

Mobile Document Access typically addresses some or all of the following areas:

Retrieval	Allows a mobile devices to retrieve, in one form or another, a specific document.
Integration	Allows mobile devices to work on a document by leveraging infrastructure available at the time, such as faxing and email. How to work with a document?
Security	Protection against loss, tampering or destruction of documents, and theft of the mobile device. How to enforce compliance?
Navigation	Provides some mechanism that permits mobile devices with limited or no storage capacity to access collaborative data by navigating through storage repositories. How to list documents?
Authentication	Ensures that the mobile device is being operated by a person authorized to access a specific document.

History

During the late 1980s and 1990s various hardware and software vendors commercialized systems that allowed mobile users to access conventional computer networks, such as the World Wide Web and E-mail.

Specifications such as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP), and Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) were developed to provide standardized mobile interfaces to existing network infrastructure.

Mobile applications began to encompass electronic documents, typically by way of converting data from one format into a format suitable for a mobile device, primarily to provide Email attachment support to mobile devices with no local storage ability.

Concurrently various remote document access solutions, such as SSL-VPN, IPSec VPN, and WebDAV, were being developed as a means to overcome various network infrastructure issues in order to provide remote document access solutions to less-mobile (stationary?) computers. Many of the technologies developed for this problem, such as OCR, ECM, and technologies to convert documents into HTML, would come to play an important role for MDA solutions.

Components

Mobile Document Access systems commonly provide components by which data in one format can be converted into a mobile format. The following is a description of these components.

Document Conversion Convert a document from its native format into a format suitable for display on a mobile device. Documents, including images or text, are processed in a way so that the content of said document is viewable on a mobile device. Some systems have employed OCR technology, while others may provide full-fidelity document viewing.

Retrieval Retrieve the electronic documents, in whole or in part, from the remote storage. Although the notion of retrieving a particular document is simple, retrieval in a format suitable for a mobile device can be quite complex. Many mobile devices do not support storage on a local file system and so tricks are often employed to present the illusion of document retrieval. For example, storing documents as an attachment in an email message, whereby the attachment exists on a remote server but may be referenced by the mobile device.

Integration Allow the mobile device to work upon a document via existing resources and infrastructure. It is not desirable for a mobile device to operate on the converted form of a document so special considerations must be made to allow the mobile device to access the original document form for specific functions. For example, a mobile device may wish to fax a document stored in a remote location. In this way some facility would be provided whereby the mobile device could instruct a remote system to fax the original document form to a recipient specified by the mobile device.

Security Provide extra security measures to facilitate the unique concerns posed by small, portable devices. Existing security infrastructure is not sufficient for mobile environments and so measures adopted by VPN and other technologies must be employed.