Adding a personal channel

If your system administrator has enabled personal channels, you can create and delete personal channels for yourself. When you create a personal channel, you set properties for Web content that you want to view on your device.

Title

Identifies the channel. The title of the channel’s main page usually is a good choice.

Location

Identifies the channel’s URL or file location. A URL must be an Internet website or a site on your corporate intranet.

In the Location field, enter the URL of the home page of your channel Website.

Note

URLs entered in any M-Business Anywhere component must contain only forward slashes (/). When you are setting up directories in a Windows file system, where backslashes separate levels, be sure to change these characters to forward slashes if you copy parts of the file system path into a URL.

Channel Size Limit

The maximum size in kilobytes (KB) that the entire channel can consume on a device. M-Business Server compresses web pages for efficiency; the size limit reflects the compressed size, not the original size.

Some channels are very large and consume a large portion of the available memory on a mobile device. By entering a size limit, you prevent the channel from growing beyond that limit.

If a channel's pages add up to more than the size you specify here, some pages are not downloaded during a synchronization. 100KB should be a large enough size limit for getting started with your first channel.

Note

The Channel Size Limit setting works with the Link Depth setting. If Channel Size Limit is reached first, it supersedes Link Depth. If Link Depth is reached first, it supersedes Channel Size Limit.

Link Depth

Specifies the number of levels of links to follow from the channel's main page. If you set this to 0, for example, M-Business Sync Server returns only the page for the main location of the channel. If you set link depth to 1, it follows the links on the main page and downloads all of those pages as well. The greater the link depth, the more pages your channel downloads, which consumes more memory. Generally, do not set the link depth to greater than 1 or 2.

Include Images

Controls whether images are omitted from a channel. Deselecting this option reduces the memory that a channel consumes. If you deselect this option, your device will not download images, even if they are on a Handheld Friendly page.

Color Depth (group and personal channels only)

Sets the allowed color depth for a channel's images. The default selection is Automatic, which downloads color images to the device with the highest color depth that the device can support. Select a different setting to cap the color depth at a lower level and prevent images from exceeding channel capacity on devices that support greater color depth.

The following color depth options are available:

  • Black & White (1-bit)

  • Greyscale (2-bit)

  • 16 Colors (4-bit)

  • 256 Colors (8-bit)

  • High Color (16-bit)

Lowering the number of bits allowed reduces synchronization time and saves memory on your device.

Follow Offsite Links

If your Link Depth is set to 1 or higher, Follow Offsite Links indicate whether your channel should include pages from a server other than the one on which the main page of your channel resides. An offsite link is:

  • Any URL outside of the original HTTP site's domain

  • A different machine name, even if the machine is in the same domain

  • Any link that is redirected

Including offsite links increases the number of pages the channel downloads to your device. Turning off this option saves memory on your mobile device.

Sync Only

Check the Sync Only box if you want the channel content never to expire on the device. You would only do this with a channel that you expect have unchanging content over an extended period of time. Checking Sync Only for such a channel eliminates most of the communication with the web server that is required to determine if the web pages on the device need to be updated.

With connected users, this decreases the time it takes to synchronize the device. With wireless users, it decreases the time it takes to display the page every time the user accesses it — wireless users are more likely to notice the difference.

Refresh (group and personal channels only)

Check the Refresh setting to specify the frequency of on-device channel updates.

Table 1. Refresh options

Refresh option

Behavior

Reasons users might prefer this option

Only once

Synchronize one time, but never again.

Synchronizing a binary program file, reference guide, or template.

Every sync

Update sets of pages that change more than once a day by enabling a synchronization of the channel during every device synchronization.

Checking the latest press release, stock price, or news articles.

Only once every <x> hours

Update once every <x> hours daily, or only on weekdays.

The Only once every <x> hours option synchronizes and then disappears until the next synchronization time period starts. After a synchronization, this method does not synchronize again until the specified hourly period has passed.

Keeping track of stock quotes that change regularly.

Daily at <time>

Update at specific times during the day.

The daily refresh option synchronizes and then disappears until the next daily time period starts. After synchronizing using this method, the channel does not synchronize again until the next day and time.

Viewing a daily newsletter posted at a particular time.

Days of the week

Checking only those days of the week on which the Daily at <time> synchronization should occur restricts synchronizations to those days.

Viewing pages that change once a week or even less frequently, such as particular Web sites or reference materials.

You can add or remove a personal channel from your mobile device. However, if you later want to modify your channel properties, or set color depth or refresh properties, you must do so from your desktop. See Managing Channels on the Desktop Computer.

To set color depth and refresh properties at the same time that you create a channel, you must create the channel on your desktop, using the M-Business Server Create Channel option.

To set color depth and refresh properties at the same time that you create a channel
  1. Start your Web browser.

    In your browser’s address field, enter http://<servername>:8091, replacing <servername>with the name of your M-Business Server machine. Your system administrator can provide you with this name.

    If your system administrator installed the server on a port other than port 8091, enter http://<servername>:<port number>.

  2. Enter your user name and password, then click Login.

    Your Channel List displays.

  3. Click Create Channel.

    The Create a Channel for User form displays.

    Create a Channel for User form
  4. Enter the information for the new channel.

    Note

    URLs entered in any M-Business Anywhere component must contain only forward slashes (/). The backslash character (\) in place of a forward slash will cause an error.

    Note

    After you enter a URL in the Location field, click View to make sure that the URL does not automatically redirect to another site. For example, if example.com redirects to example.org, enter http://www.example.org in the Location field. Otherwise, you may not receive the linked pages that you specify in the Link Depth field.

  5. Click Create.

    The next time you synchronize, the channel will appear on your device.