InGeniusBlog.com

InGenius is proud to be one of the finalists for a VON award for our innovative online application - the Mitel Application Builder. Winners will be announced at the VON show.

Application Builder is a tool used to build HTML applications which run on Mitel’s large-screen 5330 and 5340 phones.

Currently, you can build screen saver applications, and hospitality applications - and we’re planning to add many more applications over the next year.

Application Builder is innovative in that dealers or customers can sign up for free, and build trial applications for free. The tool supports online demos - you and your customers can see what your application will look like in our online phone simulator - then when you’re happy, download the application to your Mitel 3300 switch, and phones.

InGenius is happy to be in the company of many excellent finalists, including Alec Saunder’s iotum, another Ottawa firm.

Update: Well, we didn’t make the top 10, but we’re pretty happy with the exposure and recognition of our hard work. Thanks VON!

We’re pretty excited around here! Our Intelligent Directory product is now available through Mitel. I’ve talked about Intelligent Directory before (check out the details here) - ID is an application that runs on your Mitel 5330 or 5340 phone, and provides a simple on-screen searchable directory of all your corporate contacts (from your corporate Active Directory), as well as your personal Outlook contacts.

The application has been in trials since May - it’s solid and really useful.

We have had to work very hard to make the application as responsive as possible when running on a Mitel phone. The CPU in the phone is nowhere near as fast as a desktop PC’s CPU - so you have to apply a ton of optimizations and special techniques to ring every bit of performance out of the device as possible.

In fact, we’ve made performance improvements throughout our beta cycles, improving performance by 5 times. We’ve also streamlined the User Interface, and added features as requests came in from our beta trial customers.

Some examples:

• The application used to run in “Corporate Contacts” mode or in “Outlook Contacts” mode. We found a way to largely get rid of this modality, and allow you to choose where your search will take place right when you are entering the characters you want to search for.
• We introduced the concept of “Favorites” and made it easy to add any Outlook or Corporate contact to your favorites list.
• Doing queries of your Outlook contacts through the exchange server was quite slow - something people complained about. So, we have changed the product to cache any Outlook contacts you save as “Favorites” so that they pop up very quickly.
• We added the ability to refine a search - if you enter a few characters of someone’s name, and get back too many results, you can easily refine your current search to narrow down your choices.
• We added AJAX style interactions on the phone pages, so as you click between pages, only the data on the pages change - none of the graphics or underlying code on the page have to reload.

The application has ended up being very usable and friendly.

Intelligent Directory is available here - download the application, the user guide and installation guide.

If you want to purchase the application, the Mitel part numbers are:

• Intelligent Directory 30 Pack:  51011224
• Intelligent Directory Presence Option 30 Pack:  51011225 (This upgrade to the basic product provides LCS presence indications on the phone beside each directory entry that is shown)

Have fun!