BYOD - page 6

Virtually everyone who’s ever used an Apple product has an Apple ID. This user account for all things Apple is most commonly used with the iTunes Store and the iOS and Mac App Stores. It’s used to both authorize purchases and to allow you to access content or run apps after they’re downloaded. Apple’s philosophy is that every person should have their own Apple ID and that each of us should use our individual Apple ID (and only that Apple ID) on each of our devices – iPads, iPhones, iPods, Macs, even PC’s running iTunes or other Apple software.

That’s a great concept, but it creates a big challenge when iOS devices are used in business or school environments. When someone configures an iOS device for an employee or student with a selection of apps and other content (like iBooks 2 textbooks), they need to use an Apple ID. But once that device is deployed, the end user may need or want to purchase additional apps or other materials.

This is often a stumbling block for business-owned devices. And it’s something that Apple has finally begun to address with Apple Configurator.

One of the first things most IT folks will think about Apple Configurator is that it’s pretty limited compared to some of the mobile device management suites on the market (including Apple’s Profile Manager in Lion Server). MDM suites are designed to make device management as easy, automatic, and wireless as possible. Most include robust monitoring and reporting features – virtually all can use Apple’s push notification system to update a managed device at any time.

Configurator, on the other hand, requires connecting each iOS device to a Mac using a USB cable to perform any administrative tasks like configuring device settings, assigning a device to a user, installing apps, or updating iOS. That means that Configurator isn’t appropriate for a lot of businesses or workplace situations. Yet, for some organizations, Configurator is a more ideal tool than most MDM suites because of its hands-on approach.

So, what kinds of environments is Apple Configurator suited to?

Quickoffice is launching an enterprise version of its signature Microsoft Office-like iPad app that includes several noteworthy enterprise features, including data encryption and the ability to disable some consumer-oriented features that could lead to confidential business data being copied off of a user’s iPad. The update also incorporates volume licensing through Apple’s volume purchase plan as well as a year of premium maintenance and support.

While there are a number of solutions out there that offer iPad users the ability to view, create, and edit Office files, including Apple’s iWork apps, they tend to fall short of some enterprise needs. While it’s possible to meet these security and management needs by using a combination of mobile management products and native apps, those combinations really don’t integrate well into a single solution. The new Quickoffice ProSelect HD app is designed to address the security needs of IT and the productivity needs of users with a single app.

Last week Microsoft accused cloud gaming company OnLive and users of its OnLive Desktop of pirating Windows 7. OnLive made headlines when it launched OnLive Desktop earlier this year and again when it updated the product to support additional features and subscription plans. The app, which is available for the iPad and for Android, provides users with a cloud hosted Windows 7 desktop complete with the core Office apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) as well as Adobe Reader and a copy of Internet Explorer that iPad users can use to play Flash content.

After not voicing an opinion about OnLive Desktop for several weeks, Microsoft publicly announced that the OnLive was violating its license agreements and effectively breaking the law in the process. The issue appears to be specific to the licensing restrictions when offering Windows 7 in a virtual desktop scenario.

Although OnLive Desktop is probably the most well known cloud-based Windows and Office mobile solution, it isn’t the only one. And its competitors are quick to point the legality of their services and their compliance with Microsoft’s licensing policies.

One short sentence in the help documents for the new Apple Configurator tool shows that the company is aware that many workers are bringing their personal devices into the office. More noteworthy is the fact that it shows that Apple is thinking about some of the potential privacy issues that can arise in situations like BYOD programs where a personal iPhone or iPad is managed by a company’s IT department.

The sentence in question is in the section on supervised or managed devices. It reads as follows:

Important: When a device is initially supervised during the Prepare process, it’s wiped of all content and settings. This prevents a person’s personal device from being supervised without their knowledge.

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Apple has continually talked about the number of companies that have been testing or deploying iPads to its workers – and if you look around many workplaces today, you’re likely to see at least one or two iPads.

If you’re craving more than anecdotal evidence that the iPad is a serious business tool, however, a new ChangeWave study offers plenty of solid proof. The study shows that 84% of businesses looking to deploy tablets are planning to buy iPads within the next three months. That follows an earlier study that showed the iPad commands 96% of the business tablet market.

Will the new iPad gobble up so much bandwidth that it will cause serious network congestion and performance issues for small businesses or even major enterprises? Are businesses networks up to meet ever increasing demands of wireless devices and mobile professionals?

These are questions that networking vendor Brocade put to its customers recently, specifically highlighting the launch of the new iPad. It found that half of all businesses think that the new iPad to could add to the number of wireless devices on their networks and possibly increase the overall amount of traffic.

A common complaint that I heard earlier this week at the CITE conference in San Francisco was that Apple wasn’t a “real” enterprise vendor. IT professionals have whined and moaned about the fact that Apple doesn’t behave like most enterprise vendors for years (as a long time Mac and Apple IT professional myself, I’ve probably muttered under my breath about Apple’s approach to the enterprise many more times than most of the CITE attendees). What’s changed, however, is that CIOs and other IT leaders can no longer simply say “no” anytime Apple or an Apple product is mentioned.

This week, Apple even reiterated the point by dropping Apple Configurator, a completely new free tool for managing iOS devices in business. It’s a tool that offers new workflows when it comes to how businesses work with iPads (and to a lesser extent iPhones) and Apple released without telling its mobile management partners or its enterprise customers.

To all those IT folks bitching and complaining that Apple doesn’t publish 18-month roadmaps and doesn’t reach out to every enterprise months in advance of a product upgrade or cancelation, I have to say this: deal with it.

If there’s a buzzword for here at the first CITE Conference, it would have to be trust. Virtually every discussion I’ve had over the past two days has boiled down to the level of trust between IT and users.

Trust may be the foundation of all healthy human relationships, but it isn’t something that comes easily to IT professionals in the workplace. That’s the underlying tension that IT staffers have when it comes to the consumerization of IT. It isn’t about devices or public cloud services. It’s about trusting the users that you support.

What do IT staffers and execs want to see in the iPad 3? Pretty much the same things as everyone else.

Apple is the pink elephant in the room at the CITE Conference in San Francisco. The company isn’t participating but the company’s products, particularly the iPad, are constantly being discussed. In talking to attendees about tomorrow’s iPad 3 launch event, there isn’t a specific IT-oriented feature that they want to see.

The consumerization of IT is about more than just a handful of users bringing their own devices into the office. That’s the big take away from the first morning here the CITE Conference in San Francisco. The real story is that movement may have started out with people taking their iPads to work and and checking Twitter throughout the workday, but it has become something much much greater.

At heart, this movement isn’t so much about devices, social networks, or cloud services – it’s about how these technologies have changed the relationship that people have with technology. Apple and other companies have made most people comfortable with technology and shown them an experience of solutions that just work.

The iPhone and iPad have been core players in the so-called consumerization of IT. This trend that is transforming whole industries is both a challenge and an opportunity for IT professionals, managers, and individuals in just about every field out there.

The first ever Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise (CITE) conference and expo as it kicks off this weekend in San Francisco. The conference is a unique opportunity to hear from IT and business leaders from every industry was well as vendors, experts, and end users that have jumped in and seized the reins of this new workplace phenomenon. On tap will be stories about innovation, case studies in successful mobile initiatives, and much more.

A recent study of finance chiefs at over 200 companies revealed that one in six expect the job of CIO to be gone within five years. More than twice that many (40%) expected that IT will eventually be folded into the finance department. This highlights the impact of trends like BYOD, the consumerization of IT, and the growing importance of cloud services.

As IT departments struggle to deal with an ever-increasing influx of iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and other “consumer” technologies, this raises big questions. Would handing management of IT over to a CFO with limited technical experience help or hinder Apple’s position as a business vendor? Would that drive BYOD programs or inhibit them? Would this ultimately be beneficial to most employees at a company?

Although Android has an overall lead over iOS in smartphone marketshare, there are IT departments that remain hesitant on the platform. Unlike the iPad and iPhone, which are beginning to be seen to be as business tools rather than consumer-oriented entertainment devices, most Android phones have yet to prove that they offer a business feature that can’t be found on other platforms. Samsung’s newly announced Galaxy Beam smartphone may be the first Android phone to solidly offer something powerful and unique for business users.

The Galaxy Beam is Samsung’s new handset that includes a 15-lumen pico projector. Although Samsung’s press release for the phone offering a lot of personal entertainment uses, this is a device that has clear business potential.

A new report from Forrester makes it clear that IT departments and the users that they support are not on the same page when it comes to employees using their own devices in the workplace. In fact, according to Forrester’s survey of both IT staffers and knowledge workers illustrates that IT may be largely out of touch with how many users are bringing their own iPads, iPhones, and other mobile devices and how many devices each employee is bringing to the workplace.

This adds an interesting counterpoint to the study that we profiled early today that indicated that by and large IT departments are beginning to embrace BYOD and other parts of the consumerization of IT trend.

When it comes to the consumerization of IT, there general perception is that IT professionals are very resistant to allowing the use of so-called consumer technology like the iPhone and iPad along with various personal cloud services. While it is true that many IT departments are hesitant about some aspects of this movement, they aren’t as fully resistant to consumer technology in the workplace as media reports would make you believe.

In fact, the results of a recent study looking at the use of personal computing technologies in the enterprise indicate that many IT departments are actively embracing the iPhone and iPad and the entire consumerization trend. The study, being reported by Business Computing World in the UK, included more than 600 senior executives around the world and turned up some surprising results – including how much money goes into managing employee-owned devices.

Securing business data on employee-owned devices like the iPhone and iPad is one of the biggest challenges for IT departments when it comes to operating bring your own device (BYOD) programs. The mobile device management (MDM) approach taken by most companies is an excellent starting point because it aims to make devices themselves more secure. Unfortunately, it also tends to impose limits on what workers can do with an iPhone or iPad that they bought and paid for out of their own pockets.

Another approach to the challenge is to carve out a specific niche of secure storage on each employee-owned devices. Good Technology has always offered this mechanism for securing business emails and related technologies like shared contacts and calendars. This week, Good took that concept and made it available to iOS developers in a product called Good Dynamics.

Mobile devices are now so common in the workplace that we’ve reached a tipping point where providing mobile options for many desktop apps has become a requirement for businesses. That’s the findings of a new survey from Symantec on mobile device use in business.

The survey, initially reported by InfoWorld, identified that not only are the numbers of mobile devices increasing, but also that the tasks they perform are increasing. A dramatic number of companies are now seeing core business tasks being completed on mobile devices. That’s driving the need for companies to develop comprehensive mobile apps for access to corporate information systems.

One of the challenges of BYOD programs is the need secure corporate data on an employee’s personal device. That usually includes locking down the device and applying varying management profiles to it. This can be as non-intrusive as requiring a passcode meeting certain criteria or it can be very restrictive and limit core features and services like iCloud or Siri on the iPhone 4S.

While there’s a technical challenge to securing employee-owned devices, there’s also a personal challenge. It’s not a small demand to ask for someone’s brand new iPhone or iPad and impose limits on what they can do with it, even if that means something as trivial as enforcing a passcode policy. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that employees sometimes object to that intrusion, particularly when it comes to more severe management requirements.

The question is: how does IT respond to this situation?

This week’s Microsoft announcement of the details of Windows 8 on ARM-powered tablets raises a big question: Will Windows 8 tablets based on ARM or running on more tradition x86 hardware blunt the iPad’s surge in business and enterprise environments?

A few years ago, it would have been easy to say that Windows 8 devices would become the defacto standard in business, particularly for large companies with Microsoft-centric IT infrastructure. But conventional wisdom like that has broken down when it comes to workplace technology in the face of BYOD programs and the consumerization of IT trends. In today’s environment, there are many factors that could tilt the playing field in favor of either Microsoft or Apple.

In Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial, it wasn’t a stretch to realize that the big brother figure was meant to represent IBM. That makes it very ironic that IBM now has more Macs, iPads, and iPhones deployed than any company except Apple.

The extent to which Apple devices are being used at IBM became clear during a presentation at MacWorld|iWorld last week by Chris Peppin that detailed the initiatives of Big Blue related to Apple. Those initiatives are pretty shocking considering the fact that IBM was once Apple’s number one adversary in the business technology market.

The sheer volume of available apps is one selling point for iOS. For those using the iPad or iPhone in the workplace, there is an ever-growing selection of business and productivity tools. Some of these, like the apps from Salesforce.com, tie into existing business solutions and are available at no charge. Others may not be free but fill critical business needs like those that provide the ability to view and edit Office documents (examples include Quickoffice, Documents to Go, Office2, and Apple’s iWork apps).

This presents a conundrum to some IT professionals. In business environments most desktop applications (Mac or Windows) are purchased using volume or site licenses and delivered to workers using mass deployment tools. The software, or more accurately the license to run it, is purchased as and remains company property.

iOS apps, on the other hand, are treated by Apple much like music tracks or TV episodes. They’re purchased using an iTunes Store account and can be installed on any iOS devices tied to that account. Essentially, they become the property of the person who has purchased or downloaded them. That flies in the face of traditional IT tactics – a point reported by Network World as a constant source of issue to IT departments and a point of discussion at the MacIT conference that ran alongside MacWorld | iWorld last week.

For longtime Apple fans and new Mac and iOS users alike, this is a fascinating time to be living and working. Apple is becoming a fixture in every kind of workplace. It seems like every week there are stories of businesses investing in iPads or MacBooks, including the recent Forrester report that one in five people now use an Apple device on the job and 50% of companies issued Macs to at least some staff members. Not to mention the Checkpoint study that showed corporations preferring iOS over both Android and BlackBerry.

In other words, Apple, the iPad and iPhone are revolutionizing business, and Cult of Mac is joining that revolution. That’s why I take great pleasure in introducing Ryan Faas, Cult of Mac’s new business reporter. Ryan will be writing for the site full-time, covering the incredible march of Apple technology into the workplace. Ryan is a veteran tech journalist who has written extensively about Apple, business and enterprise IT, and the mobile industry. He’s contributed to Computerworld, InformIT and Peachpit Press.

Comparing uprisings in the Middle East to what happens when a manager brings his or her own iPhone to work seems like a bit of a stretch, but IT executives say the effect has provoked a similar shake-up.

The people (read: employees) have brought about a groundswell of change in the corporate world by opting to bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and choosing their own apps. This has upended the “regime” of IT departments, who used to be able to control what devices employees used and what ran on them.

For some time we’ve known that companies are increasingly encouraging their employees to bring their iPhones and iPads to work. The trend known as BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, will likely accelerate as enterprises seek ways to cut costs and workers push to bring consumer-grade devices to the job. In a new report, researchers find the larger the company, the more willing firms are to junk the company phone for something from Apple or Google.