So correct me (please) if I am wrong, but I have never witnessed a non IT person typing a URL (i.e http://www.xxxx.com)  into a phone.

Until someone comes up with a way (where has Windows Live Barcode gone ?(but that's another story ! )) of easily putting URL's into a phone this is a real stumbling block for making the reality of the mobile Internet/intranet work.

To draw an audience into the world of mobile web-access, adding corporate home pages to the list of favorites on each device is one way.   This is a step closer to your non IT user getting online however its still two or three steps to get someone to your content.   So wouldn't it be great to be able to speed dial with one keypress straight to your mobile web page of choice.  So this wouldn't be much of a blog post, if this wasn't possible.  Well it is...

Following Mike Halls article on creating Windows CE shortcuts, see:

http://msdn2.Microsoft.com/en-us/embedded/aa731295.aspx

To create this functionality on a Windows Mobile Smartphone, this is what I did -

First create a text file on your desktop PC, called anything you like with the extension .lnk,  i.e BRF.lnk

This contains the URL you need.   Note the first two characters are the number of characters of the command, i.e everything apart from first three characters.

54#"\Windows\iexplore.exe" http://www.binaryrefinery.com

Next step, using Active-Sync or WMSC copy the file to your start menu on the device,  i.e \Windows\Start Menu

A quick reboot of the device and you will see your shortcut appearing on the start menu.      Final step is to press the menu key on the phone to assign a shortcut key.    Hey presto that's it...  You can now press and hold the shortcut key and it will now jump straight to the URL of choice.

Perfect to get people quickly to your mobile line of business application, or mobile web portal.  At Anglia all Windows Mobile phones we provision have key '6' assigned to go straight to our mobile portal.   It works really nicely.