Posted by Jeff Chesebro on Wed, Feb 13, 2013
With more people bringing their own mobile devices such as tablets or personal smartphones into the workplace, mobile device management becomes more important than ever.
Blackberrys used to be the king of all mobile devices, and they were all company issued and managed. Email would be pushed to them through company policy, and certain restrictions such as passwords and encryption would be required. This required a costly investment in Blackberry Enterprise Server as well as on site email services.
Many people don’t know that these options are also available on Apple, Windows, and Android smartphones and tablets as well. Most businesses these days use Exchange for email, either hosted online or on their own servers. ActiveSync is a fantastic technology included with Exchange, and it provides many of the same features that Blackberry Enterprise Server offers.
Once someone configures their mobile device for email in an organization, it is now linked the Exchange and ActiveSync in that organization. Administrators now have several options they can configure on the personal mobile device.
- Require device encryption
- Require a password (can be simple 4 digit number, or complex)
- Wipe a device after a certain number of incorrect password attempts
- Wipe a device remotely after it’s been lost or stolen
- Disable Camera/Texting/Wi-Fi
- Limit Email size
- Disable downloading of attachments
There are many considerations when allowing users to bring in mobile devices to the workplace, but luckily the tools exist to reduce the security impact of allowing these additional devices. This will make employees happier as they can now use whatever device they feel most comfortable with, and it will make executives happy knowing that confidential information can stay confidential on these mobile devices.
With hosting services such as Office 365, Blackberry still offers these features for free now with Business Cloud Services.
Posted by The Blogging Desk on Fri, Jan 28, 2011
- by Eoin, "The Natural", Beck
PreCentral:
Consumer Maket Research Analyst and VP Research Director of Data at Forrester Reineke Reitsma provides an interesting report on the state of Enterprise support for mobile OSes in 2010. Citing the Enterprise and SMB Networks and Telecommunications Survey, which polled over 2000 enterprise executives in Europe and North America, Reitsma notes significant year-over-year changes in device support, going from nonexistant to 8% support for webOS, and an increase from 2% to 11% for Android. It’s also interesting to see that despite RIM’s utter dominance in this sector with 70% representation, there are still eight other OSes maintaining support, with five of them showing growth. And if you need more proof of just how different the enterprise market is, look no further than Windows Mobile, which maintained it’s 41% despite a palpable sense of stagnation in the consumer sector.
I also read an article about how Deutche Bank's pilot program to replace Blackberry with iPhones and iPad's has been successful. They're using Good as their email client. I use Good for my corporate email and it's an ok product on the iPhone but with no true multitasking, it's a little bit slow in opening up email. Also, it does alert on new email, but it only does a push notification message for meeting alerts (not email).
Good runs much better on Android, due to the support for background processes and better notifications. The downside to that is it's a battery hog. In fact, when I had an HTC Incredible, it killed the battery in a few hours because it wouldn't allow the phone to go into a sleep mode. I think Good fixed that bug in a later release but it highlights a bigger issue with Android in the enterprise. Because each manufacturer puts a software layer on top of Android (and in many cases the Carrier also includes a buch of crap ware you can't delete) there are way more potential sources for software bugs that can cripple the device. From my experience, the Android way is to have amazing functionality that starts out half baked and have the users be beta testers. To some extent, it's that way with all mobile OS's, but Android seems to be the worst at it.
Mark my words….If Good puts out a webOS client and HP puts out some compelling hardware and makes webOS a viable platform for mobile developers, webOS will soon be one of the top mobile OS's. In many ways it's the best mobile OS that I've used and it's one hell of a lot more polished than Android is right now and it's one of the easiest to develop for. Trigon strives to make sure its clients are using the best software possible in the mobile space, so be sure to contact us if you'd like us to help.
Posted by The Blogging Desk on Thu, Sep 09, 2010
Google:
Search as you type. It’s a simple and straightforward idea—people can get results as they type their queries. Imagining the future of search, the idea of being able to search for partial queries or provide some interactive feedback while searching has come up more than a few times. Along the way, we’ve even built quite a few demos (notably, Amit Patel in 1999 and Nikhil Bhatla in 2003). Our search-as-you-type demos were thought-provoking—fun, fast and interactive—but fundamentally flawed. Why? Because you don’t really want search-as-you-type (no one wants search results for [bike h] in the process of searching for [bike helmets]). You really want search-before-you-type—that is, you want results for the most likely search given what you have already typed.
"It's not quite psychic, but it is clever." That was from Othar, engineer for this project during the live press conference. And that noise was me, packing my suitcase to leave Earth.
I don't know about you, but I'm sure Google could be taking over this planet any day now. Go ahead and try Google Instant. You type in "w" and your local weather will pop up. Ah!! You didn't even hit enter and results showed up!
It's only a matter of time before th..wait. Hold on.
Someones at the door.
He's wearing a Google T-Shirt. He says he.."just wants to talk."
Quick, Google Instant the police, tell my dogs I love them!
Posted by Solutions Center on Wed, Sep 02, 2009
According to the "August 2009 Threat Forecast & Report" regarding email SPAM, which is provided by MX Logic; a web and e-mail security provider reports that SPAM volume has increased by 27 percent month to month since June and a staggering 400 percent since February 2009. Currently, SPAM has reached whopping 94.6 percent of total email generated. What does that mean? Well, your email servers may end up working overtime to keep up... All the better reason to have a third party Anti-SPAM email host such as Postini, which is provided by Mosaic Technology; a technology partner of Trigon Technology Group. Postini services take the burden off of the email server within your domain and prevent SPAM email from ever getting near it. It has an easy to use web interface giving the individual user the option to manage their SPAM and quarantine messages picked up by Postini and gives the user the ability to adjust their individual threshold for SPAM filtering as well as managing their own approved and blocked senders list. So, if you want to know more about Postini and how Mosaic Technology can help, visit:
http://www.mosaictechnology.com/
Posted by Solutions Center on Fri, Jul 31, 2009
DISCLAIMER: This Post Does Not in Any Way Mention Apple.
Recently I created a Gmail account to act as a secondary email for myself. For the sake of conversation, let's call it iheartstevejobs@gmail.com. I was going to use it just in case I needed my password reset for various websites and also as a poor mans auto-archive of my main email. Boy what a mistake that could be.
Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo shut off inactive email accounts after 6-9 months of in-activity, meaning that my secondary email could be deactivated if I don't log in often. So one day a greasy haired nerdlinger who dreamed of getting iheartstevejobs@gmail.com would be inundated with glee to find it was finally available. Imagine his surprise when he started getting banking and password information into his inbox. What he would want to do with my Twitter account is beyond me, but rest assured I want to be the only one alerting the world that I just had breakfast!
So the morale of this story is that you shouldn't forget to log into your email early and often and also to eat your vitamins. For the record, C is my favorite.