enterprise - page 8

WWDC is only a few days away and the event is shaping up to be filled dramatic announcements. Expectations include an Apple HDTV, a new Mac lineup that includes an updated Mac Pro, the unveiling of the next iPhone, iOS 6 with Siri support for the iPad, updates to Siri’s functionality, and load of additional details about Mountain Lion.

Whether all those expectations are met or not, WWDC and its keynote will pack lots of information for developers and IT professionals as well as various Apple product announcements and previews. The big announcements may be the best part of WWDC for most Mac users and Apple fans, but the event is, at its heart, a giant powwow for developers. It also offers IT professionals and CIOs their best glimpse at Apple future plans and the new technologies that they will need to support and/or manage.

So what are IT leaders and business professionals going to be looking for at WWDC? Here’s our IT wish list for this year’s WWDC.

Professional social network giant LinkedIn has acknowledged that it is looking into a massive data breach. As a result of the breach as many as 6.5 million user accounts may have been compromised. Account data including login information and passwords have been leaked and posted to a Russian hacker site. Although LinkedIn hasn’t confirmed the breach or detailed which accounts might have been impacted, the fact that the company is acknowledging the potential threat and investigating it is a big cause for concern.

At this time, it’s better to err on the side of caution.

If you use LinkedIn, you should consider that your account data has been compromised and change your password immediately.

Dell hasn’t had anything resembling success in the tablet market with either businesses or consumers, but that isn’t stopping the company from deriding the iPad and its success.

According to Dell Australia’s managing director Joe Kreme, users only buy iPads because they’re “shiny” and troubleshooting any issue with an iPad or iOS could take up to four days. As a result of these so-called facts, Kreme said that the tablet race hasn’t even started yet.

We first looked at Mobilisafe a couple of months ago when the company’s signature mobile management suite was still in private beta. The company, which was started by former T-Mobile Android engineers, seeks to offer broad mobile device and data security without requiring the types on-device agents or profiles used by most mobile device and application management suites.

Mobilisafe executives describe their product as a mobile risk management solution rather than as a device or application management tool. The distinction being that Mobilisafe helps IT departments identify specific threats that can then be mitigated rather than simply locking specific apps and restricting access to on-device features like blocking an iPhone user’s ability to snap photos and upload them to iCloud.

A decade ago, your mobile phone number may not have meant much. In the days before number porting, mobile phone numbers were transient. If you switched carriers or moved, you got a new number.

Things are a bit different today. You can take your number with you from one mobile carrier to another, you can port it VOIP services like Vonage, or forwarding services like Google Voice, and you can even port it to a landline phone. Your phone number, much like your personal email address or Twitter account, belongs to you for as long as you want to keep it.

That can create a problem for companies implementing BYOD programs. If an employees bring their own phones, they also bring their own numbers. For many employees, particularly those that are mobile professionals, their mobile number is the go-to number to reach them. When such an employee leaves that company, what happens to his or her phone number?

The news that IBM bans Siri for every employee that has an iPhone 4S and participates the company’s BYOD program unleashed a lot of discussion about whether the company was being paranoid or prudent. One of the bigger questions to come out of all that discussion was a reframing of the issue itself – does Siri have a place in the business world to begin with?

Setting aside the security and privacy issues that led IBM to ban Siri, are there compelling use cases for Siri in the workplace? If there are, do they outweigh the privacy and security concerns? Could Apple do more to make Siri business-friendly?

Apple’s meticulous focus on design and usability is one of the hallmarks of its products. That attention to detail is evident in almost every Apple product, but iOS devices epitomize Apple minimalist approach and its goal of removing any barrier between the user and a great user experience. Unfortunately, not all iOS developers or mobile web developers get to that same level of minimal and effortless design.

There are probably hundreds of small ways that developers can miss the mark when designing iOS apps or creating content designed for mobile devices, but Gartner research director Johan Jacobs notes that most mobile app/experience design failures boil down to ten common mistakes.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

SOTI provides an interesting mix of mobile device and PC management solutions. On the desktop, it offers Windows PC management as well as remote access and screen sharing tools useful to many help desks. From a mobile perspective, it provides a range features including device and app management. Its on-device software and SDK support a range of useful features for iOS devices including two-way chat with users and remote access options. MobiControl SDK also includes a file sync solution for managing content and internal enterprise app data on iPhones and iPads.

Apple has added several whitepapers to its training site. All them address enterprise technologies in Lion. While many of the whitepapers have been available from Apple in the past, two of them appear to be new additions. The first of these details the use of Configuration Profiles to manage Macs running Lion as well as iOS device while the second covers 802.1X networking.

The first new whitepaper, which isn’t dated, is definitely the more interesting of the two.  It discusses Mac management as an extension of mobile device management (MDM). As we reported last week, Apple appears to be positioning Macs running Mountain Lion to be managed in the same manner as iOS devices rather than using its long-standing Managed Preferences architecture that has been built into OS X and OS X Server since their initial releases over a decade ago.

We’ve profiled a range of companies and products during our Mobile Management Month event. One of the things that seems to stand out to some readers is the number of companies that offer mobile management as part of a larger set of enterprise and IT solutions. Integrated solutions are nothing new to IT. The cultural shift of mobile devices and BYOD programs, however, have many organizations wondering whether to go with an integrated  or branch out into new territory and use a range of deployment, management, and monitoring tools for desktop systems as well as mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad.

One of the challenges that the BYOD and consumerization trends are creating for IT departments is employee use of public and/or personal cloud services. We’ve covered some of the big challenges this presents in terms of data security and ownership as well as the potential business continuity problems stemming from multiple versions of documents stored across different cloud services by multiple employees.

IT concerns may be more common and well-known, but there are cloud-related issues that employees need to consider as well – particularly if they use a work email address to register for a service, access a service from work, or use a service to store or transfer work-related files.

As technology and always-connected devices become more pervasive in our daily lives, companies, think-tanks, government agencies, non-profits, and other organizations have access tremendous new pools of information about virtually anything on the planet. The challenge of such a “big data” world is how to aggregate that information, analyse it, make substantive conclusions, and then package in a useful form.

Making sense of data and communicating the results in a concise and effective manner is such a big challenge that many organizations will pay research firms and think-tanks to analyse and package data form them – often as static snapshots  with pages of text and charts and accompanying PowerPoint files.

The ability to access real-time data in a useful way is one of the things that makes MeLLmo’s iPad app Roambi a great business intelligence tool. Today, however, the company announced that it’s taking Roambi a step further and allowing companies to turn the Roambi’s dynamic and interactive data dashboards into full-fledged iOS apps in their own right and market them in the App Store.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

FileWave is a new entrant into the mobile management space but a longtime player in many business and enterprise environments. FileWave offer multi-platform file and application deployment and licensing management for all desktop systems across an organization. The company has a very impressive track record for both IT-managed and self-service provisioning and deployment that has made it a solid enterprise solution for companies with Macs, Windows PCs, and Linux desktops. More recently, the company has begun offering iOS device management functionality. For Apple-oriented businesses, the combination of desktop and mobile device application management makes FileWave a choice well worth considering.

Microsoft is a company known for creating strict, labyrinthine, costly terms in its commercial and end-user licensing. With Windows 8 seen as a make-or-break product for Microsoft, the company has already been adding licensing terms intended to strengthen its hand in the mobile market. As we reported earlier this year, Microsoft’s enterprise licensing for Windows 8 has provisions to coerce businesses into buying ARM-based Windows RT tablets while punishing those that deploy iPads with more costly terms.

Ratcheting things up a notch, Microsoft’s general counsel Tim Fielden announced new details about the company’s end-user license agreements. Although not mentioning specific products or services, Fielden posted on a Microsoft blog that many new agreements will prohibit users from initiating a class action lawsuit against the company.

RIM has made a lot of headlines lately. Most of them have involved an ongoing exodus of executives leaving the company for greener pastures and/or reports of massive layoffs as the company tried to restructure itself under the leadership of new CEO Thorsten Heins.

There’s one bright spot of publicity for RIM this week, however. J. Crew CEO and Apple board member Millard Drexler uses a BlackBerry Bold 9900 – a fact noted after a CNBC piece about operations at J. Crew.

Is this good news for RIM? Yes and no. It shows that not every major company has abandoned the BlackBerry and not every executive has demanded an iPhone (at least not yet). Of course, if Drexler wasn’t a member of Apple’s board of directors, it’s likely that no one would really care what type of smartphone he used.

Mac and iOS business app developer Marketcircle announced the latest of version of Daylite, the company’s business and productivity management app. The new version, released today, is a major upgrade from previous versions. Daylite is an excellent business management tool for OS X and iOS. It focuses on aggregating all manner of company data, monitoring processes, and helping ensure that business users follow up on leads and opportunities. The new release focuses on increasing performance, workflow, and integration with iOS devices.

After the insanely fast sellout of tickets for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which kicks off in a couple of weeks, we profiled a range of other events for Mac and iOS developers and for IT professionals who support and/or manage Apple’s desktop and mobile platforms.

While these events are great for developers and IT pros, they focus on the underlying technologies of OS X and iOS more than on how companies and other organizations can implement and leverage Macs, iPhones, and iPads in various businesses and industries. For that, there’s the i.Business Expo, a series of events focused on using Apple technologies to both improve business workflows and for customer/client engagement.

The biggest challenge for many business when dealing with the consumerization of IT and BYOD trends is often cultural. IT needs to cede control of devices, app choices, and where/when employees and executives actually interact with corporate data. That’s a cultural shift for IT. There’s an equal cultural shift that needs to happen when it comes to users and executives who must take at least partial responsibility for keeping their iPhones, iPads, or other devices secure along with the business data on them.

This requires user education and solid communication between users and IT. To be truly effective, security policies need to be endorsed by senior management and adoption and understanding of them needs to follow from the top down through the organization.

Unfortunately, that isn’t what’s happening in many businesses. In fact, the people most likely to ignore or violate such policies are C-level executives, members of the board of directors, and even IT.

There are a handful of intrinsic beliefs that Apple has as company – most of which came from Steve Jobs. The constant focus on building experiences rather than just products is one of them. Another is that Apple looks forward and not backward when it comes to technology. The company simply acknowledges that to offer its users truly great new experiences (and products), it cannot hold onto (and be held back by) outdated technology.

Apple often gets criticized for pushing its technologies and its users forward, particularly in business and enterprise IT circles. Despite that criticism, Apple may be doing companies (and users) a big favor by not supporting older Macs and OS X releases indefinitely as Microsoft does with Windows XP – and that advantage isn’t just about better products.

An IDC study commissioned by Microsoft discovered that supporting XP now costs companies and schools five times what it would cost them to support Windows 7 – making Apple’s forward-looking policy not only technically advantageous but also significantly less expense in the long run.

Over the course of May, we’ve highlighted a number of different mobile management companies in our Mobile Management Month series. Profiling these companies made me realize how much the mobile management market has expanded to include cloud or SaaS options in addition to on-premise servers installed inside a company’s network.

That’s hardly surprising really – after all cloud models are being applied to almost every type of business computing need.

There are several significant and  attractive advantages to using a cloud service as your approach to mobile management, particularly for small businesses.

Over the past several months, Box has reinvented itself. The company went from being a pretty basic cloud storage solution to true enterprise solution and a hub for storing, viewing, and editing all manner of documents on an iPad or other mobile device. Box’s journey continued this week as the company launched a series of new features for business and enterprise customers.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

Absolute Manage MDM provides all the major mobile management capabilities. In addition device and app management, Absolute Manage MDM offers a secure on-device file store option called AbsoluteSafe that can be used to deliver files directly to user devices. AbsoluteSafe includes the ability to automate access to files by policies or schedule in addition to on-demand file deployment, removal, or access rights adjustments. The suite integrates with the company’s Absolute desktop client management (Mac and Windows) and deployment suite, together they can provide complete IT and lifecycle management features mobile devices, Macs, PCs, and software.

TSA is the latest U.S. federal agency to make a significant investment in Apple technologies in what may be a move away from RIM’s BlackBerry and Windows PCs. The agency is set to start a pilot program that will run over the next three years and will involve heavy investment in Macs, iPhones, iPads, and even Apple TVs.

According to federal documents (PDF link), the security agency plans to spend $3 million on Apple products and has an amazingly wide range of uses for them in mind. The plans go well beyond the scope of Apple investments made by other U.S. government agencies like the EPA and FAA, which focus primarily on iPhones and/or iPads.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

This post is brought to you by SolarWinds, an IT software management company with more than 93,000 customers worldwide – from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses. Click here to download a free 30-Day Trial of Mobile Admin from SolarWinds. Author: Denny LeCompte Coauthor: Stephanie Mitchell.

Which smartphone or tablet are you bringing to work?

With the constant stream of news emerging in the Apple versus Android battle, we think it’s time to look at which devices the IT pros are choosing, and how recent trends are affecting what devices are brought into work.

One interesting moment during last year’s WWDC keynote was when Steve Jobs said that Apple was moving beyond the digital hub strategy it had embraced for years. He talked about how our computers are no longer the hub of our digital life and said that Apple was demoting the Macs and PCs and making them just another device like an iPhone or iPad.

That message set the stage for iCloud and for cord-free iOS devices that don’t need a Mac or PC for activation, backup, or sync.

There was also a much subtler message, however, that no one really picked up on at that time. In making the Mac just another device, Apple was likely laying the groundwork to change how companies and schools manage Macs – essentially treating them as just another device and bringing the mobile device management (MDM) paradigm introduced in iOS 4 to OS X and Mac management.