Appendix A  
Mobile Portal Assessment Worksheet

This appendix provides a planning worksheet to help with your mobile portal deployment process.

This appendix contains the following sections:

Business Objectives
Technical Goals
User Behaviors and Patterns
Performance and Capacity
Front-End Systems
Growth Projections
Authentication and Secure Access
Channels
Quality Goals

The questions are provided as starting points. Use them to learn more about your organization’s business needs and potential areas of concern around deploying mobile portals.

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Business Objectives

Check and elaborate on the answers that apply to your situation.

Identify the business reasons that you want a mobile portal:
Improve ease of access to information
Speed up access to information
Expand the types of users who can use your portal
Improve user’s experience
Provide new services
Other
Define which portal users will be allowed mobile access:
All portal users
Field employees (using PDA-capable applications, for example)
Other user categories
Define which portal users will be allowed voice access:
All portal users
Users who cannot use visual interfaces
Other user categories

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Technical Goals

Check and elaborate on the answers that apply to your situation.

Indicate reasons that you want to provide mobile access to your portal:
Deliver a service
Provide information
Enable field employees to access your portal
Save time for users
Describe your target population.
List what applications you want to provide and the reasons you want to provide them.
Chart planned transaction volume (including during peak use times) and level of concurrency.
Identify how users will access your mobile portal:
Public carrier
WiFI (wireless LAN)
Mobile messaging devices
WAP-capable mobile phones
General packet radio service (GPRS)
Document the phases you will use to deploy your mobile portal.

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User Behaviors and Patterns

Check and elaborate on the answers that apply to your situation

Define your user profile.
Describe how your mobile portal users differ from your other portal users.
Describe the experience your mobile portal users have with mobile devices:
Seasoned (provide profiles and define degrees of use)
Neophyte (provide profiles and define degrees of use)
Chart your growth projections for mobile users:
Immediate
Mid-term
Long-term
Identify the content your mobile portal will provide:
Existing
New
Describe why your users will use your mobile portal content and identify how they have used the same content previously.

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Performance and Capacity

Check and elaborate on the answers that apply to your situation.

Identify your requirements for:
Performance
High availability
Response times
Consider whether your requirements are suitable for peak use times.
Identify user activity and how it fluctuates.
Analyze your existing data regarding user connections and Web traffic.

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Front-End Systems

Check and elaborate on the answers that apply to your situation.

Identify what mobile devices you will support:
Mobile phones (brands and models)
PDAs (brands and models)
Identify what browsers (and versions) you will support:
HDML
HTML
cHTML
iHTML
XHTML
VoiceXML
WML
Identify what type of applications you will provide.

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Growth Projections

Check and elaborate on the answers that apply to your situation.

Specify what countries your users are in.
Identify how mobile access will change the use of your portal and its content:
Increase use (how and by how much)
Change use (how and by how much)
Identify how mobile access will affect your business objectives.
Study how mobile access to your portal will affect content and identify what changes, if any, will be needed.

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Authentication and Secure Access

Check and elaborate on the answers that apply to your situation.

Document your authentication and encryption policies.
Describe why a gateway is needed.
Identify when SSL should be used:
Authentication
Access to specific channels
Other
Identify whether your single sign-on requirements will change for mobile access.
Identify authentication and encryption concerns of your applications.

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Channels

Check and elaborate on the answers that apply to your situation.

Specify how your mobile portal offerings will differ from your HTML-based portal.
Review existing portal content and identify what content your mobile portal will provide:
Existing
New
Identify what content must be revised (shortened or reorganized).

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Quality Goals

Check and elaborate on the answers that apply to your situation.

Develop plans, including time-lines, for how you will provide mobile access to your portal.
Identify processes you can apply to ensure that your deployment will progress smoothly.
Testing
Maintenance of existing service
Redundancy
Define baseline performance and reliability measurements.
Identify which mobile devices you will test.
Identify what your change control procedures will be.

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Copyright 2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.