Low bandwidth option with SMP and Agentry

[Former Member]

Hello Wizards,

We are rolling out Agentry to some parts of country which is on low bandwidth. I know its possible in SUP applications to optimise it for low bandwidth usage.

Can I ask is it possible for Agentry client and Server SMP to have low bandwidth option please? Any suggestions please ?

Regards

Vivek Nidhi

[mark_pe · Accepted solution]

Vivek,

If you are deploying in low bandwidth parts of the country, try to optimize the application for off line capability.

• This is the best solution so far versus trying to hope that on poor signal that the complete transmit will work.
• In any platform or any app, if the transmit is slow, you may risk losing data.  So might as well do offline capabilities as it is clearly available in all the products of Agentry and optimized that way. 
• So people like how the product was designed before as people in the park (forest) industry do not have signal at all, they would just use the offline capability to do all the work. Once they are done on their job in the forest (park rangers), they go back to their nice office and transmit using their docking station.
• Also the attention span of a user nowadays is 8.25 seconds. So do you think people in low bandwidth area will wait for a transmit that may take 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes or more?
  • This is why there is offline capability so when they are back in the office they transmit and it takes 2 minutes or less

the network or infrastructure of internet service provider do matter and this is why you choose a phone plan that provides better coverage or try the offline approach.

Best Regards,

Mark Pe
SAP Platinum Support Engineer

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Mark,

Sorry slightly different subject related to this, if we enable background sending. Does the Agentry client expect the device to be online all the time. Because we have enabled this option now and we are getting lot of Error(14) due to lost of connectivity. So technically to reduce this its better we disable background transmit and manually request to sync once they are in good connectivity ?

Regards

Vivek Nidhi

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Background sending will not cause Error(14), as this is the error for when there is not connection to the server.

When the client loses connection to the server they should get a pop-up saying they lost connection and be asking the user to reconnect.  If they are in an area with a bad or no connection they will see the Error(14).  That is why it looks like they are getting it more.

As the users are in areas a lot with no connections then there is no point of having background sending (it not a full transmit as it only sends transactions to the server). 

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Stephen,

My expectation was that application should queue in all the requests in case if there is no connectivity rather than popping up an Error(14). That is something which I am still not clear.

Regards

Vivek Nidhi

[mark_pe · Accepted solution]

Vivek,

With respect to your question: "Does the Agentry client expect the device to be online all the time. Because we have enabled this option (Background Sending) now"

Background sending is an option of the Agentry technology (it's available to be with all users who wants to develop their mobile application designed specifically for Background sending). It is expected that when a design team enables this, the entire application is spec. to use the background technology. This means all transactions gets transmitted on the fly (meaning connection needs to be available). 

Please note that most of our out of the box products in SAP was not optimized for Background Sending. The original design of our out of the box is offline connectivity. By just seeing that the editor provides the option for background sending does not mean the Work manager/Inventory Manager app was designed to support it.  The Background sending is an Agentry feature for a mobile application to have an option to use Background sending.  Special rules are in place or limitation on what is available for Background sending. 

By just switching it, is a big deal as now you are taking on the role that you have designed the mobile app (from scratch) to be specifically enabled for background sending. Again, none of the SAP products that we have off the shelf was designed for background sending. This option is for new application that is designed from the ground up.

Error 14 is an error if the mobile client (Agentry) cannot see the backend for whatever reasons (i.e. ISP not available, Firewall, no-signal and others).

Best Regards,

Mark Pe
SAP Platinum Support Engineer