Ah, I wish Mobile Strategy was as simple as EAM and a container

I was getting pretty comfortable with the idea that Mobility practice was coalescing around a Workspace/container that could deliver a strong set of collaboration applications and a business application ecosystem on any employee owned device.

Think Good and their Good Dynamics ecosystem, Citrix with Receiver, Xen Mobile, and WorX, etc and emerging players like Dell.

And there is no doubt they can deliver a very secure email and collaboration application experience, all without the enterprise managing or messing with the employees device via MDM. Admittedly the cost is the use of an “imposed UI” versus the native UI on the device, but overall I have been feeling pretty clever and even liked by my end users.

But a set of dialogues this week that I have had the opportunity to be part of have me feeling profoundly less comfortable

1. Talking to Good last week about their roadmap, they revealed that some of their more mature, larger customers were now coding not only internal applications to the  Good API’s that allow access to the  secure container, but also B2B applications as well.  Wow! What are the implications of getting developers to code to the Good API’s? Can you say lockin? But how else do you leverage the secure container?

2. Then I had a talk with the Microsoft CIO. Beyond the kind of corporate applications you might want to protect in a container, Microsoft is seeing huge value and massive groundswells of innovation from staff building mobile apps to solve employee problems like finding colleagues, mapping campuses,  helping people track shuttle buses via GPS,  pointing a camera at a building to identify it and find a meeting room etc etc. Small things maybe, but building energy around mobile. Well to do that enterprises need an application wrapping/store deployment that perhaps bypasses the container. Oh, and by the way this employee engagement with Mobile is not a new idea. The team at Apple was advocating this three years ago….I just forgot as we fought to get an acceptable container deployment established.

3. Then of course the Microsoft announcements of Office 365 clients for almost every platform bring new capabilities and challenges. They automatically stream updated versions of the client at connection, removing a lot of application management worries…and in small ways bring policies and capabilities that feel like a light weight container…How might this integrate into a mobility strategy?

Yikes. Pretty clear that there will be no “once and done” when it comes to mobility strategy, whether MDM, EAM, EMM or whatever flavour/acronym you have embraced.

My 13 Year Battle against corporate laptops and VPN may be coming to an end

LOL.  I have been advocating the abandonment of corporate, “fat laptops” (ie with local data) and VPN’s for what feels like a long long time.  Although the battle is not yet done. it feels like the growing popularity of virtual desktops, mobile containers and middleware, and device independence driven by consumerization, BYOD, and mobility may finally get a significant part of the enterprise world to adopt my belief system.

The issue has always been complexity, security, and cost.

1. Enterprise laptops with local data are expensive to manage, and even with encryption and a ton of policy agents well nigh impossible to feel secure about.

2. End users connecting via VPN could never deal with the complexity of the client software, and even when connected struggled with data location, performance issues, and the like, while IT staff could never really troubleshoot those distributed end points. And the endless challenges with proxies and firewalls in hotels, third party locations, etc!

3. Ah, and the angst when a laptop with data on it was lost. Prove it was encrypted! (the IT challenge). Meanwhile the poor end user, prone apparently to leaving laptops in back seats of personal cars and taxis, gets to sit with Corporate Investigations, who bring in the bright spotlights, the rubber gloves (smiley), and the truncheons to make sure we get the truth…..and decide if the enterprise has to publicly declare its shame about lost data.

All this time I have been carrying either a personal laptop, a mobile thin client, or a factory configuration corporate owned laptop with no data, no corporate identity, etc. I access my enterprise applications via Citrix published applications or published desktop, knew all my data was happily secure and backed up in the data centre, and lived the worry free life of a road warrior with nothing to lose. Port 443 always gets through hotel proxy servers!

Offline access? That was what Blackberry was for.

I used to get a lot of stick about that.  Offline access was essential! Editing large spreadsheets on Citrix not as good,  yada yada. But for years I happily worked from anywhere, never lost any data, never declared a security incident, and frankly never had to carry the crappy laptops most enterprises give their staff.  The last few years my mobile solution was a MacBook, now its a Chromebook. and both lighter, cooler, and more reliable than the corporate crap.

So after wandering alone in the wilderness of virtualization and thin client, why do I think the tide is turning?Bottom line, mobility used to be a distraction, now it is job #1.  And mobility, in an age of consumerization, has people understanding

• virtual desktops solve a lot of agility, speed, and data issues at your primary workplace, and the ability to get to that virtual desktop from any device makes mobile access much easier
• The tablet with a secure container like Good or Citrix Receiver gives people a large enough screen to really view email attachments, the ability to attach a BlueTooth keyboard, and the container allows offline access
• So people are already comfortable with the idea of four devices. Smartphone, tablet, a personal device like a home PC /personal laptop for remote access, and a device in the office. Although we are making inroads in having the office device be a thin client, there is still a community that wants a laptop type device, provided by the company. Or, they don’t want to use a BYOD laptop, because they still need “offline capability” (sigh)

So the challenge remains how to reduce the cost/complexity of that population of offline laptop “needy people”. Ah, along comes the new Citrix Receiver and WorX Email. Instead of provisioning a fully managed enterprise laptop with a fat Outlook client and encryption agent so these needy folk can do offline mail, I can give them a low-end, lightly managed laptop with no corporate version of Office. Citrix WorX can provide offline email in the container for laptops as well as tablets, and allow people to do email offline when they need to, then use the laptop to connect to their virtual desktop when a network is available.

And I can do the same thing on a BYOD laptop so that the offline argument goes away.

You can feel it! Change is in the air.

Wow – who’da thought? In a BYOD world I’m picking Blackberry

So I have embarked on the early days of a BYOD adventure. My firm is going to allow, actually encourage BYOD very soon and after 20 years of having my various employers take care of my mobile profile and costs, I’m going out on my own. (smiley)

I thought hard – IPhone looks good and I am already a big user of the Apple ecosystem with IPOD and IPAD.  Most of my family and friends are Android fanboys or fangirls and forever mocking my existing, locked down BB7 Bold 9000.

Yet somehow or other I chose Blackberry! I have a Z10 that I quite like, and have decided it is my main smartphone from now on. Why?

1. I like the core concepts Blackberry has built into it.  Blackberry Hub as a message centre, and the focus on “communications” really matches my use cases. I get email, text, LinkedIn, and Twitter messages in a quick reliable way, and that is where I tend to spend my day.  The LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook apps are all “good enough” , and work well on the large screen

2. I really like the swipe interface as opposed to the “button”

3. and oddly enough, after having it blocked on my work BB for years, I find I am really liking BBM for testing and quick escalation into audio and video calls. Probably much more than I enjoy Apple FaceTime.  So call me a late bloomer! I really like BBM, and can see how in a BYOD world it is going to be an unintentional productivity benefit for firms that have been blocking it for years.

4. Finally, I actually believe that Blackberry Balance is going to provide a better experience accessing work email and applications than Good for Enterprise.  Good does a powerful job enabling Android and IOS to access the enterprise, but does not have the best interface into MS Exchange, attachments, and Sharepoint.

Now I confess I am hedging my bets…the Z10 will be my primary phone but I always joke about my “manpurse” and it will still contain a couple of other devices

5. an IPOD Touch, connected via the Mobile Hotspot on the Z10,  so I retain access to the Apple ecosystem, SIRI, and other great Apple capabilities

6. and I have a BB Q10 as well, that I will also connect via the Z10 hotspot, for those times I absolutely must have a physical keyboard.

All in all though, I still feel very strongly positive about the Z10. I think it is about the technology, although it might be some latent Canadian nationalism at work.

It is also interesting at this point to be accountable for my own wireless bill. Now I don’t have the extra data load from work yet but I am checking my usage all the time, looking at the plan details, and becoming a much more conscious wireless consumer.