Hold the Press!  ProcessMaker mobile is now available on a mobile phone near you.  And it is a Killer App.

You might be asking yourself, “Did I miss a release?  When did this come about?”

Well, truth be told, it has only a little to do with our own fantastic ProcessMaker developers and a lot to do with general industry timing.  In the pre-iphone days, the idea of offering a  mobile BPM or Workflow solution meant building a specialized client application which had some synchronization methodology for passing information captured on the handheld device back to the server.  In fact about 2 years ago, we had a client that requested such an application as part of a complex, multi-party workflow for surveying Art Museums around the world.  In retrospect, we realized that the request and the project came at the moment of a pretty big paradigm shift in the mobile world, and the iphone was its prophet.

For this particular client and at this particular juncture, we decided that our best alternative was to approach a mobile forms/survey provider and then integrate with this provider through Web Services.  We thought briefly about building the application ourselves but then realized partnering was the best option.

This project project started off well, but the client continued to make lots of changes in their mobile forms which caused the project to drag on.  Additionally, the continued changes added new costs from the mobile solution provider.  About half way through the project the iphone was released.  We continued down the path we were on with this client.  We thought that it wouldn’t be wise to change course based on the whims of an unproven new technology.   But as we moved forward, so did the iphone.  They didn’t hit 10 million units of sale as fast as Jobs predicted, but they were certainly becoming more and more ubiquitous.  Oh, and then they were put on a 3G network.

So why was this so important?  After all, a serious enterprise application like ProcessMaker wasn’t going to announce that it was offering Mobile workflow on the iphone (a highly targeted consumer device), or would it?

Well, it all boils down to one pretty important detail - that unbelievably beautiful browser!  When the iphone hit the streets, one look at the gorgeous browser and the team at PM thought, “wow, this is amazing!”  And more importantly, our next thought was inevitably, why would I browse any other way?  Well, we wouldn’t and we won’t.  Apple set the bar, and now no one can go lower.  The acceleration in the browser wars on mobile devices means that everyday more usable browsers (unlike the one I have on my Blackberry 8800) become ever more present.  This means that as an application provider that is entirely based in the browser (no client/server architecture), quite suddenly our potential audience of users is growing at an exponential rate.

That’s right, with no real changes in our application, users can now build sophisticated, custom workflows and execute them in mobile environments like the iphone.  And that eliminates a whole host of other issues.  Now we are truly agnostic with regards to how our users use PM - mobile and desktop to us are one and the same.  And once you’ve tried truly clientless computing there is now going back.  After using Zimbra, I could never go back to Outlook.

So, if you have a mobile component to your workflow, don’t look any further.  Why pay other vendors tens of thousands of dollars to license their mobile workforce solutions?  It just doesn’t make sense.  ProcessMaker now gives it to you and it’s Open Source!