Microsoft recently announced a partnership with etrials in the electronic patient diary arena. The press release notes that etrials has been standardized around Microsoft since 1999.

As some readers are aware, ClinPage has articulated the etrials position on Palm, which is that Palm has a great user interface and brand but is suboptimal for clinical trials or organizations looking several years ahead.

At the 30,000 ft. altitude, etrials’ concerns include a lack of a clear migration strategy for a new operating system (or hardware) and limited form factors for the trials themselves. On a more granular level, Windows offers more font sizes and the ability to have more than one application running at a time.

Wrinkled Palms?

To learn a bit more, we recently chatted with Hemang Patel, an enterprise mobility solutions specialist in Microsoft’s U.S. healthcare and life science practice. Patel is based in Virginia and has an extensive background in the telecommunications industry, having worked at Lucent, Nextel and Iridium.

Patel is as respectful of the Palm name as anyone, allowing that they offered the first adroit combination of a mobile phone and personal digital assistant (PDA). He notes some customers still refer to beloved features on the Palm platform that they would like to see in Windows.

Even so, Patel notes that Microsoft has a 9-year history of refining its handheld platform. He predicts the life sciences will gradually transition to Windows Mobile. “The Palm operating system is a dying breed,” he says. “They have outdated connectivity. We are getting some good penetration where Palm used to control the market.”

Multiple Form Factors

Beyond that, he basically confirms the time-honored Microsoft strategy. The company watches the early leaders. Then it slowly and methodically catches and surpasses them. Unlike Palm, Microsoft is not tied to one proprietary handset manufacturer, working with dozens. It can run on tablets and a variety of small screen formats.

Another area in which Microsoft has taken the lead, Patel says, is in the tools for developers building applications for the devices. Work to create applications for desktop users can be leveraged to bring the program to a hand held device. “The developer tools we have for Developer Studio—Palm cannot compare to that,” says Patel.

He is not just referring to software, of course, but to the human capital that use the tools. “We have 7 million Visual Studio developers for the desktop,” says Patel. “You’re leveraging that to build Windows Mobile applications.”

Using .NET

The company’s devices are built to use any number of tools, which include integration with the familiar Microsoft applications, including Office and Exchange, .NET, Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005. In a presentation of Patel’s we dredged up online, it’s clear that security on the Windows Mobile platform is robust. For all those reasons, Patel believes that anyone looking at enterprise-wide usage of a mobile application will have trouble finding anything better than Windows Mobile.

Looking ahead, it’s interesting to note that Windows Mobile is already prepared to work with XML data, which will be increasingly pivotal in organizations relying on CDISC data standards or electronic submissions to the FDA.

Down the road, that could mean avoiding a step in which data from Windows Mobile devices needed to be converted from some other format into a CDISC-compliant one. Says Patel: “You can take XML information from these documents and send it to back-end information systems or clinical information systems.”

Here, finally, is a quote from etrials in the joint press release. “This alliance with Microsoft demonstrates our technology leadership and progressive mindset, with our clients’ best interests driving our strategy,” said John Cline, CEO of etrials. “Our integrated technologies are designed to solve problems, and we feel that the Windows Mobile platform is the only one designed to do that.”