How practical is the iPad for enterprise applications?

Question

The management team at my company is rapidly abandoning their Blackberries and embracing iPads. At the moment they're still just emailing each other but I'm starting to see some interest in making some of our internal MIS apps run on the iPad, so they could quickly pull up some data during a meeting.

Our company is strictly Windows/SQL Server based and has a lot of internal WinForms and WPF apps. These tend to be "fill in some parameters on a form and get a populated datagrid of results" apps. I imagine any iPad apps would initially work the same way. Eventually they may want graphing (simple line and bar graphs). We also do a lot of GIS work with ESRI/ArcObjects and it's intriguing to think about moving some of those too.

How practival is the iPad for enterprise apps? Is there a workaround for the lack of a printing function (what was Jobs thinking!?) Can I install private internal apps without Apple's approval or going thru the AppStore?

What hardware and software is needed to do iPad development? What is the equivalent of Visual Studio and what does it cost? Are there competent contractors out there who could port C#/WinForms apps to the iPad?

Answer 1

You should take a look at monotouch. Its $399, but well worth it. http://www.monotouch.net. It will allow you to reuse some of your .net C# libraries on the IPad and write your applications in C#.

I believe you can deploy directly to the IPad with an enterprise account without going through the app store.

There are plenty of apps in the app store that can print to network printers. So I am fairly confident that it is possible.

Answer 2

Not very!

Aside from the immaturity of the platform, there are numerous restrictions on what you can and cannot do as its basically a "big" iphone and not a "small" imac.

However it does have a nifty web browser so it might make more sense to web enable some of your apps (with appropriate security). This would benifit many other users besides the poor deluded iFans.

Answer 3

I guess if your enterprise application is web based, then that's a good start.

Answer 4

MonoTouch is a good solution but it still has issues that come from its ancestor monobjc. Its not just creating c# class files but also dealing with objective c memory management as well. So some objective-c knowledge is needed which then leads to why not just do it in objective-c in the first place.

The Apple developer tools are free and the Visual Studio for the mac is XCode. The UI is usually built in Interface Builder (think Expressions Blend). BUT to get the iPhone SDK yoy must registernwith Apple (required for MonoTouch too).

If you are doing in-house deployments then your company must map 299 a year. To deploy only through the app store the cost is 99 per year. In-house deployed apps do not require apple permission to be released, but app store apps do.

You can only create iPhone/iPad apps on a Mac period.

You can read more information about this at http://developer.apple.com

There is also an excellent list group of developers world wide iphone-sdk at googlegroups.

Of course if your web based you get to bypass all this, but its worth joining the free safari webkit program at apples developer site.

FdB