Redefining Enterprise Mobile Devices
Last one for today from Forrester I promise, but hey sometimes there’s more interesting stuff than other days :-).
… With more and more enterprises going mobile, businesses will see a rapid increase in the number of mobile devices introduced to their employee populations in the coming years. The good news for IT operations professionals is the diverse range of mobile device options — across all types of form factors — from which to choose. The bad news is that the growing numbers of employees who are not waiting for IT, instead going mobile themselves, are introducing major support, management, and security pains to the corporate environment. To prevent the trickle of incoming mobile devices from becoming a flood, IT operations must define a standard list of approved mobile devices from which employees are permitted to choose, with particular emphasis on standardizing on a subset of supported mobile devices and locking out all others. …
Enterprise mobility, always a nice topic in discussions with clients. Reason I quote this article is for the subtle sentence :
“The good news for IT operations professionals is the diverse range of mobile device options — across all types of form factors — from which to choose.”
My definition about Enterprise Mobility is quite simple. Working away from your desk. And that could be with your phone/PDA, your laptop/TabletPC, a PC in an Internet Cafe/Kiosk, your home PC/Mediacenter, etc.
Forrester in this case triggered me on one important thing : platform.
What if all of these form factors (Smartphone, PDA, laptop, TabletPC, UMPC) all would be based on the same application platform ? Would integrate with your enterprise Communication and Collaboration platform out-of-the-box ?
Wouldn’t that be great ? No more “mobile email” on smartphone / PDA’s that require their own proprietary servers and service (and related management).
Well Microsoft has this platform : .NET and the .NET Compact Framework on Windows Mobile. Imagine the value to your company if you could leverage application development effort / management expertise and tools, etc across all enterprise mobile initiatives …