Actioneer: The Action Messenger

It is easier to get things done with Actioneer. You don’t have to hassle with user names and passwords to get entry to a password-protected Website. More and more Websites are password-protected, as they add features that require user accounts, either for financial transactions or just to allow behavior tailored to individuals, as many Cloud services do.

When a friend you encounter says “The book club will be reading ‘The Great Gatsby’ next, you should pick up a copy”, you don’t immediately pull out your BlackBerry and order it because doing that just takes too many steps. But suppose you could just enter “bk gatsby” to see a list of available titles at your online bookseller?

That’s what Actioneer does, saving you many steps by doing them for you. Using Action Messaging, it dispatches agents that navigate to your online bookseller, logs you in to your account there, then navigates to a search page, enters the string “gatsby”, and triggers a search. Select a title and you can easily buy it.

Here’s the number of steps each method of buying a book requires, assuming Amazon is your bookseller, you have the Amazon BlackBerry app installed and you have one-click ordering turned on at Amazon; also that you are not signed in at Amazon (good security practice).

The old way requires 13 steps on a BlackBerry Bold or Curve running OS 6 or OS 7, with ‘point’ and ‘click’ counting as one step:

Get out your BlackBerry and click it open by pressing the Trackpad key.
Back out of whatever page it is on, click to get to your home page showing icons.
If the Amazon icon is not in a top row, (and normally it would not be), click the BlackBerry Menu key.
Using the Trackpad, point to “Open Tray” and click the Trackpad key.
Scroll down with the Trackpad to find the Amazon icon, point to it and click the Trackpad key.
At the Amazon site, point to “Sign in” and click the Trackpad key.
Type in the password for your Amazon account and click the Trackpad key. (Or invoke a password manager to enter it for you.)
Point to “Sign in” and click the Trackpad key..
Type “gatsby’ into the search box and click “Enter”.
Point and click on the department menu to narrow search results.
Point to the Books department and click on it.
Examine the title choices and select one by pointing to it and clicking on it.
Point to a shipping option and click on it to place your order.

With Actioneer AM, you get the same thing done in only 4 steps: div>

Get out your BlackBerry and click the Convenience key you have set to open Actioneer.
Type “bk gatsby”, click Go!
Actioneer logs you in to your Amazon account with your encrypted password and moves to a search page to trigger a search for Gatsby in the Books department; you then point to the title choice you want and click on it.
You point to a shipping option and click on it to place your order.

The old way requires 13 steps, lots of clicking and tapping and skating around with the Trackpad, and the expenditure of many “attention units”.

The Actioneer way takes just 4 very logical steps, with far fewer manual operations and wasted attention units. No need to remember your password or employ a password manager, and it is safer.

Similarly, when your meeting is breaking up and as a group you are setting the date for the next meeting, you want to see your BlackBerry Calendar in the month view

The old way takes 6 steps on a BlackBerry Bold or Curve running OS 6 or OS 7, including a long scroll to “View”:

Click open the BlackBerry by pClick open the BlackBerry by pressing the TrackPad key.
Back out of whatever page the BlackBerry is on, perhaps with several clicks on the Return key, to get to your main page showing icons.
With the TrackPad, point to the Calendar icon, (assuming it is visible in a top row), press the TrackPad key to open the Calendar to today.
Press the BlackBerry Menu key to open the Calendar Menu
Scroll down to View with the TrackPad, press the TrackPad key to open the submenu of view choices.
Scroll down to Month, select by pressing TrackPad key to open the Calendar to Month View.

Using Actioneer AM, 2 fast steps do the trick:

Click open your BlackBerry and Actioneer AM by pressing the Convenience key for Actioneer.
Type “mn” and click the TrackPad key to open the Calendar to Month View.

This is very fast compared to navigating to the Calendar, clicking on Menu and scrolling down to View, clicking on it, then pointing to Month and clicking on it to get the desired view. Even quicker than opening a paper calendar.

And soon it will be possible with Actioneer to add month and year to open to any desired month, with default to the present month or year if not present.

Some years ago, people began talking about “single sign-on”. Within an enterprise, many data sources needed password protection, and the plethora of passwords that an individual accumulated needed a solution in the form of a single password that would gain entry to all those data sources.

Actioneer is “single sign-on” with a vengeance, because it can serve an individual not only for data sources within the enterprise but also for Websites outside the enterprise, including those that are password-protected. With Actioneer’s Action Messaging, logging in to a password-protected data source is truly invisible, either within the enterprise or on the Web. There is no difference to an Actioneer user between an open data source and a password-protected one. The same simple interface does the job in both cases: enter any data needed, and select the Action to be executed, either by entering a short keyword anywhere in the message or by selecting the Action from a list.

Actioneer then goes about its business to execute the selected Action. If log-in is needed along the way, it does that with no special input from the user. The user arrives at their selected destination with no effort at all needed for the log-in part of the process.

And Action Messaging can execute additional steps at the selected destination, like inserting user data into a search box and triggering a search

In making it much easier to get things done, Action Messaging opens the Web for more use by smartphone users. Many of them go to the Web far less than they could, simply because getting there is so complicated. By making it really easy to use the Web via your smartphone, Action Messaging makes the Mobile Web far more accessible to you. Using both open and password-protected sites, you will find yourself doing things with it you would never try now.

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