An excerpt from an Information Week article by Carl Zetie:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=14800388
Many leading PDA vendors share a common ambition: to sell more PDAs to enterprises. Yet they often complain about the difficulty of doing so, and wonder what more they need to do to make their devices as pervasive in enterprises as PCs have become.
Based on the complaints I've been hearing lately from enterprise users of PDAs, one thing that they need from their vendors is as much a change in attitude as a change in technology. Today's devices are unnecessarily difficult to acquire, configure, deploy, and maintain in the field. To address these issues, vendors need to stop thinking in terms of PDAs--personal digital assistants or, at best, professional digital assistants--and start offering Enterprise Digital Assistants.
So how would an EDA differ from today's PDA? In a lot of ways it would be similar: From the outside you probably wouldn't be able to tell them apart, any more than you can tell a PC loaded with Windows XP Pro from one loaded with the Home Edition until you turn them on. The differences in the operating system would be probably be as subtle as the differences between a desktop operating system designed for the enterprise versus one designed for the home, maybe even invisible to the application user. But an EDA would be designed for life in the enterprise, from the way it's acquired through the way it's deployed and used right through to the way it's disposed of at the end of its useful life.
As an EDA user, you would notice changes as soon as you turn on the device. For one thing, it would demand that you identify yourself, at the very least with a password, perhaps with a biometric mechanism such as a fingerprint reader, or more exotically with technologies that can validate the rhythm of your typing or stylus use. Secured access wouldn't be optional on devices that are as readily lost or stolen as PDAs, yet can contain large amounts of sensitive corporate data or, worse, the ability to connect with corporate systems. It might be acceptable for a PDA to offer the option of password security, but an EDA simply wouldn't permit the user to vary the security settings from those IT mandated..... etc. etc. etc.
Good job Carl!
7:58:23 PM 
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