Mobile Everything

The Lotus Mobility Portfolio session covered a lot of old ground that we've already blogged about at the LoLa conference last year, but there were a couple of interesting nuggets to make the 2 hours worthwhile...

There was an amusing* 6 minute clip that explains Lotus Mobile Connect better than anything I can write here. View it here

Also some good tools that the presenter uses that we should look at as we start to get more serious about mobile devices (is Col reading this?)

• www.testiphone.com - allows simulation and testing of many different devices
• www.mymobiler.com - iPhone simulator
• www.useragent.org - useful when developing websites that may be displayed on many different devices

One area that we haven't spent much time thinking about is that last one on the list. Let's take a real world example - www.MyMMs.com. Right now the site is optimised for 'standard' browsers on traditional deskops and laptops, and works great. But what if you're out and about? If someone suggests that it would make a great valentine gift? Try it on your phone now! You might buy if you can use the site right then and there, but if it's a frustrating experience would you always get onto a 'real' PC and follow though?

With the enormous growth of mobile devices and netbooks, are we missing out on impulse sales just because the site is inaccessible to mobile browsers? If this isn't a problem for us now I'm willing to bet that it will be - and surprisingly soon.

IBM has a solution for this, and I'm sure others do too. What's even better though is that tools exist to measure the number of site hits that don't result in a sale, and also to measure the browser configurations being used to access the site. But is anyone looking?

* this is the special definition of "amusing" that only applies after 2 hours of Security presentation

Introduction to System Centre Mobile Device Manager

This was a pretty interesting lecture and gave me a great overview of the product. Microsoft only released this product at the beginning of April (in this guise). They had some research from MED Finance that predicts that from 2006-2011 mobile messaging will grow 2.3x, however mobile corporate data access is predicted to grow 5.4x it's existing user base. This is where they see the key driver for mobile devices.
System Centre Mobile Device Manager(SCMDM) enables Windows Mobile 6.1 (shortly to be released) devices to be managed much the same as a PC or laptop. They can join the domain and have GPO's enfoced and so on. This allows admins to do things like:

• Disable the camera
• Prevent writing to external storage
• Full device encryption
• OTA provisioning and boot strapping (yes even fresh from the box the end user can do this with no IT staff input giving them a fully compliant corporate IT build still, all via a customisable self service webpage)
• OTA software distribution (based on WSUS)
• Mobile VPN with session persistence (great for when you go through a tunnel on the train!)
• Application control and denial
• Remote wipe or block (i.e. someone knows where they left their device and can retrieve it but needs it to be temporarily blocked to stop misuse)

This is again configured via a System Centre snap-in and the service is provided by 3 server roles: Enrollment Server, Device Management Server and Mobile VPN Server (in DMZ).

There is a dependency on having Active Directory in the organisation.

There is a plan to do other device OS's in the future (such as RIM/Palm/Symbian but no timescales as yet as they are having some licensing discussions with those relevant rights holders.

All in all SCMDM looks to be aninteresting project and certainly an area we may want to investigate further should we be using SCCM in the organisation.