SAN RAMON, Calif., May 16, 2012 – Accela, Inc., the leader in solutions for government-citizen interaction, today introduced the Accela Mobile Hub, a cloud-based service that streamlines the development and management of productivity and citizen-engagement mobile and social apps for government built around the company’s Accela Automation® enterprise platform. The Accela Mobile Hub includes the local government market’s first cloud-based mobile server administration portal, and a developer portal featuring a range of application programming interfaces (APIs), software development kits (SDKs), and tools to connect apps to agency data.
Complementing its existing SDK for the iOS platform, Accela also announced the availability of a developer preview SDK for the Android platform, enabling participants in Accela’s Developer Program to review, test and provide feedback to the forthcoming kit. Developers interested in previewing the Android SDK and joining the Accela Developer Program may register for an account at https://developer.accela.com/.
“Governments today are under great pressure to become mobile as quickly as possible,” said Jerald Lo, Chief Technology Officer at Accela. “Agency workers want to apply the productivity benefits of their personal mobile devices on the job, while the public increasingly expects to conduct business with their governments 24/7 and on their devices of choice. Combining the advanced capabilities of Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform with the Accela Cloud, the Accela Mobile Hub provides the secure environment, multiplatform support, and scalable tools to meet these demands.”
The Accela Automation platform and Accela Mobile Hub serve as the kernel of the company’s open m-government ecosystem, which includes applications, devices, and Accela data, backed by the security of the Accela Cloud. The platform is designed to help government agencies and third-party developers rapidly build mobile and social apps for their government workforce and for citizen engagement.
The Accela Mobile Hub provides a “home base” for government agencies and their apps, offering both security updates and performance enhancements. The Hub is designed to scale with usage and demand and is capable of supporting any number of third-party apps and users. Augmenting the Accela Mobile Hub’s flexibility and ease of use is a mobile server administration portal, which enables Accela Automation customers to create secure, trusted connections between their agency data and Accela mobile apps, and manage the configurations, administrators, and users for their organization. The administration portal allows administrators to temporarily or permanently disable agency access to individual apps or all apps, as well as create and manage various environments to test and deploy apps via a simple and easy-to-use web interface.
Accela Automation customer Westminster, Colo., has been testing the portal with great success. “The new administration portal has all the configurations for the connection between Accela Cloud and our on-premise servers,” said Donald Shih, Software Engineer II, with Westminster’s IT Department. “It allows us to set up different environments for testing and using the mobile apps, giving us and our IT team a greater degree of control over our deployment process.”
The Accela Mobile Hub’s developer portal provides access to the Accela Mobile SDK, enabling developers to easily build and manage transformational apps that integrate with Accela Automation and are targeted toward the needs of agency staff, specific professions, and the general public. In addition, the platform’s openness means that existing apps can be easily ported between operating systems, so that a developer building an iOS app can easily create an Android version of it, as well.
Access to the SDK requires registration with the Accela Developer Program, where tools, tutorials and best-practices samples are available to help developers get started quickly. The SDK is currently available for the iOS and Android platforms, with support for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, Windows 8, and HTML 5 coming soon. Apps built using the SDK will work only with agencies using Accela Automation 7.0.5 Service Pack 3 or higher.
Gabe Graham
Accela
ggraham@accela.com
