Mobility and the “Real Time” Enterprise

A Techcrunch article about Jive’s new app marketplace over the past week got me thinking again about the role of mobility and social media in the enterprise. In another survey concerning “web-workers”, it is alleged that 85% of workers use their mobile phone as their primary communications device, 60% use VoIP with only 46% using fixed line communications as a primary communication tool. Both mobility and social media are important enterprise tools.

• In recent years, as businesses have started evolving toward more people-centric collaborative environments powered by wikis and other social software solutions, real time has become an integral part of the social software stack that colleagues use to communicate and work together.

Not one player has successfully extended a social revolution to the enterprise successfully.

Major ISVs and enterprise vendors have attempted to integrate social media into the enterprise, including Microsoft with SharePoint with its wiki-style pages and built-in messaging, and Salesforce.com with a Twitter-style Chatter service, but nobody has really succeeded.

The challenge for enterprise social media is two fold. First, most enterprises have corporate standards governing firewalls, security and licensed software, which is installed and maintained by IT departments and secondly the web world of beta software, open standards and an “anything-goes” kind of approach to social networks and information sharing is incongruous to corporate IT environments.

Jive are one company looking to change that, but whether Jive’s blend of open APIs, an open app marketplace and installed software can successfully bring these two worlds together remains to be seen. After all, Google is now making inroads into business with the most complete offering of these two components so far, Google Apps.

Essentially, however, the issue comes from the fact that there’s little cognizance of business process activity that generally takes place within traditional ERP, CRM and supply chain systems. These traditional applications address critical functions in the enterprise that are closely tied activities that can be measured in the form of increase revenue or reduced costs. 

• Also, from a user point of view, “making it look like Facebook, doesn’t make it Facebook”, even if it helps a user to navigate through familiarity! Consider that Linked In has 35 million members compared to over 400 million for Facebook!

Mobility is becoming a key part of enterprise strategy, and companies face the simultaneous challenge of trying to integrate both social media and mobility (as well as enabling social media platforms on mobile platforms).

• Add to this the task of managing individual liable devices within companies, and the challenge facing IT departments seems even more daunting. IT managers then face a critical decision between tightly “ring -fenced” corporate environments or take the altogether riskier approach of opening up their environments altogether.

The hype and excitement surrounding the Android platform has intensified with the recent release of Google's own handset running the OS, Nexus One. Offering high levels of user-customisation, social networking integration and a 'desktop-like' mobile browsing experience, the device is very attractive to consumers...but is the operating system anywhere close to ready for the Enterprise? Leaving aside the iPhone effect (consumer desire to use their own smartphones within a company) and the need for corporate devices to have some kind of roadmap (RIM BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices offer this to business via carriers), there are still a baseline set of criteria that a platform should meet: An 'Enterprise-ready' operating system should offer the features required by a mobile user as well as conform to the security policy defined by the IT department: Features

• Wireless access to corporate email (usually Lotus Domino or Microsoft Exchange), contacts and calendar information, ideally updated via 'push' with no user-interaction required. All information exchanges between the device and the server should be secure. Access should preferably be available via both cellular and WiFi connections.
• Support for Virtual Private Networking (VPN) infrastructure enabling access to internal corporate applications and network resources
• Corporate IP PBX support providing free calls over WiFi when in the office between internal extensions, and landline-to-landline call charges for landline numbers.

Corporate Email: At the time of writing, only Android 2.1 features native Exchange support, although only the Nexus One features this version of the OS. HTC-branded Android devices such as the Hero and the Tattoo both already feature HTC's own Exchange client which supports full mailbox synchronisation including subfolders as well as contact-lookup and out of office support. Other third party applications such as Moxier Mail, Nitrodesk's Touchdown and Dataviz's RoadSync are all Exchange ActiveSync licensees, that support baseline Exchange policies VPN support - Android 1.6 (Donut) brought with it support for Virtual Private Networks, including PPTP, L2TP and IPSec protocols as well as certificate authentication. IP PBX/VoIP Support: SIPdroid is a free-to-use VoIP client for the Android platform that can be used to interface with any IP PBX that supports the SIP standard. Security Naturally there are perils to and open source operating systems (besides fragmentation), such as the ability to freely manipulate and exploit vulnerabilities in the platform. How does Android stack-up here?

• Application-sandboxing: In Android all applications must state what hardware resources and file locations they require access to, and only those areas will be permitted by the operating system. It is not possible to alter these once installed without at least requiring approval by the user. This approval is requested during the initial installation and can be viewed at any point within the Applications setting menu.
• Remote Device Wipe - Although part of the Exchange ActiveSync protocol, it is not currently supported on the HTC Exchange client. This is on the roadmap for HTC Exchange 2.0. A third party Exchange ActgiveSync solution would be required to enable this functionality. Any device marked for wipe from the Exchange server will not be able to synchronise any new information, but any information held on that device will not be erased.
• password Usage - It is not possible to enforce use of a password on the Android platform using the Exchange ActiveSync policy without a third party application. Again, this is on the roadmap for HTC Exchange 2.0 However it is worth noting that Android does support the use of hand gestures as a form of unlocking a device, rather than an alphanumeric password:
• Corporate Usage Policy - It is not possible to remotely enable or disable hardware or software elements on the Android platform at this point, neither does the OS support on-device encryption. However, companies such as Sybase support the Android platform http://www.sybase.co.uk/detail?id=1064587

All in all, Android is nowhere near mature enough yet for a typical business to support Android as a credible platform. Third party providers may be offering the “plumbing”, but there are still a lack of basic enterprise functionality (policy support, password, remote wipe) to make it a credible choice…yet! Andrew Brown