Mobile Device Managment

So day 4 starts, its cold, rainy and windy. Fortunately I get to spend all my time in a conference center ;-)

However it does mean the attendee pool party has been moved to the underground car park - not quite going to be the same atmosphere methinks!

First session today was about Device Management and they mean specifically mobiles.

Fact roll:

• Smartphones have increased significantly in importance to businesses
• 2013 will see more smartphones in the enterprise than PC/Laptops
• Trend is away from platform conformance (irritatingly for us)
• Often consumer purchased but used for business (as an example all the pics here are with my personal smartphone)
• Customers want 'a single pane of glass' view over their infrastructure from Servers to phones, not multiple consoles/infrastructures, and certainly not an infrastructure per vendor!

Microsoft have decided to invest more in this areas and thus have rolled their System Center Mobile Device Manager product into Configuration Manager v.Next. They have already announced that they will support Nokia/Symbian platforms at RTM and are stating that they are working with other vendors, no time lines committed yet.

This is interesting as when I was at MMS in 2008, they were saying then that they were in discussions with Apple and Rim, so either these discussions a)take a really really long time, b)are not going well or c)lost focus... Might be worth getting a more formal roadmap under NDA to understand what is really happening.

Apart from Symbian, MS will also support WinCE 5.0+ WM6.1+. These devices will be able to do over the air enrollment, inventory, settings management, software distribution and remote wipe. WinCE devices wont be able to remote wipe or do over the air.

Over the air enrollment ties into SCCM and your EA Certificate infrastructure (PKI - which we will have as part of Connex). Demo'd well and worked flawlessly.

Admins can register users, or they will be able to self register.

They are working to make the user experience the same on all platforms, so things like offloading compliance check/remediation assessment to the SCCM server will ensure the user is not impacted regardless of how powerful their device is or what OS it runs.

Demo's of settings management and software distribution were equally impressive, and tie into the new Software catalog with v.Next - i.e user can choose to register their phone in it, or what software they want installed.

Public beta will be available by end May 2010

Really interesting session and I'm very hopeful it can be a good solution. I would want to see some firm commitments on timelines and platforms. Again though as we have Software Assurance on SCCM, we will be entitled to the product in the future anyway. Definitely one worth investigating!.