There was a time (as recently as version 8) that the Time Matters development team would hold a release of Time Matters to ensure that our wired synchronizations were working with the latest Palm, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices. The times, they are a' changin', Time Matters 10 recently shipped without support for the latest wave of smartphone devices.

Lack of support for these new devices and platforms has initially applied pressure on firms using Time Matters to use a multi-step process to accomplish synchronizations. The current work-around is to use Outlook or Exchange as an intermediary synchronization solution. Unfortunately, Time Matters does not support round-trip synchronization from the smartphone back to Time Matters. So in essence, users are limited to a “push” solution as opposed to a bi-directional sync.

State of the sync…

The explosion of the smartphone market has created innovation but also fragmented the market with new platforms. Software vendors, like Time Matters, who focus on device specific solutions now find themselves facing a plethora of platforms to support (or not). In the U.S. legal community our smartphone market primarily consists of:

Apple iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm WebOS, Google Android and Windows Mobile

The dominate devices are iPhone and BlackBerry with the new Palm WebOS devices starting to make dramatic inroads. Again, referring to the legal sector, devices like Android are more appealing to the techie crowd and Windows Mobile appears to have become a non-player.

Looking to the future….

Should smartphone data be securely ubiquitous or tethered by a cable? Palm and Google think yes (as do I).  In fact, Palm’s new Synergy platform makes the historic “synchronization” process feel archaic. Synergy seamlessly combines data from several online (and Exchange Server) accounts into a single entity on the Palm device. Data stays updated and normalized in the background. Read more about Palm Synergy here: http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/pre/migration/index.html . Google Android works in a similar way but uses a more limited set of sources of data.

Bringing it home…

So what does this mean to Time Matters users today, how do we reliably provide users with access to Time Matters information on their smartphones?  (shameless plug begins) I’d like to say “just go buy MobileTM”. It works with all smartphone devices and has no physical data limitations. We’re also launching a new Google Calendar and Contact sync for Time Matters. The two of these products will accommodate users’ needs in terms of ubiquitous synchronization.  (shameless plug ends) Otherwise the answer dictates only one solution; Exchange Server.

Time Matters needs to continue to improve their Exchange Synchronization.  As a community we might consider encouraging the LexisNexis team in the following ways:

• Support round-trip data synchronization from the smartphone back to Time Matters.
• Stay proactive by supporting the current version of Exchange.
• Broaden the documentation to cover more details.
• Improve the “usability” of managing the ongoing synchronization process (better user interface options for logging and troubleshooting, moving synchronizations between databases and/or servers, upgrading between versions of Time Matters and/or Exchange)

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