There is one topic I want to spend a little extra time on: the release of our touch-optimized HTML5 interface for mobile devices. Back in October, we articulated our long-term user interface strategy (incorporating HTML5) at Workday Rising, our annual user conference. Once Workday 15 was delivered in December, our mobile and UI teams worked together feverishly to plan, design, and deliver an HTML5 client for mobile devices in four short months. With Workday 16, we are now using HTML5 for non-iOS platforms, including Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone. Having played around quite a bit with the prototypes during the development phase, I must say I am quite pleased with the results—the HTML5 experience is beginning to approach the native SDK user experiences for those devices in many areas. While our native iPhone and iPad apps are still functionally richer than the new HTML5 client, we expect to close those gaps by summertime, with the delivery of Workday 17.
Lastly and importantly, our foray into HTML5 for mobile devices paves the way for Workday to adopt HTML5 as our desktop browser platform. At this time, we feel that HTML5 is not quite ready to fully replace Flash for desktop browsers as there are still gaps in functionality in areas such as complex graphing and org charts, as well as its lack of wide-reaching browser support—key requirements for enterprise apps. But those gaps are closing quickly, and we expect to transition from Flash to HTML5 as soon as it’s ready for the desktop. I don’t expect it will be too much longer before I pen a similar note about that topic.
