Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’

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iPhone Enterprise Deployment

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Alongside the release of the V.3 iPhone firmware Apple have also updated their Enterprise Deployment Guide.

If you’re using iPhones within a corporate environment this is a really useful doc.  I provides some good info on how best to configure settings for VPN connections, Exchange access, Wifi settings etc, and also how provision these settings and other applications to your companies iPhones.

One of the interesting changes to the overall solution has been the addition of an ‘activation-only mode’ to iTunes.  This setting configures iTunes to only only activate the iPhone then eject the device.  In combination with some of the other restrictions available both on installation and at runtime (through the parental controls) it goes some way to making iTunes more palatable to businesses.  I can only assume this was added in response to a fairly common complaint from businesses that they didn’t really want to install iTunes on their corporate machines.  Whilst this doesn’t do away with the need, it does help to mitigate some of the concerns around it.

I may write about some of the particular subjects covered in the doc over the next few weeks, but I thought I’d post up the link in case anyone hasn’t seen it.

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Clients for Office Communications Server

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

I’ve been doing a bit of work recently to figure out what would be needed to move from current Live Communications Server (LCS) setup to Office Communications Server (OCS).  Part of this has been to think about what clients are available for the various platforms people might be using.

I thought it might be useful to post up a quick summary of what I’ve found.

Windows

Windows is obviously the primary platform that OCS is designed to work with.  To that end it has the most feature rich clients.

Office Communicator 2007 R2
Office Communicator 2007 is the main client for OCS.  It is the most feature rich client available and includes support for the full range of OCS’s capabilities:

Instant Messaging
Presence
Enhanced Presence
Assess Levels
PIC Connectivity
File Transfer
1:1 Voice and Video
Multiparty Voice and Video
Live Meeting sessions
Call Management Features
Remote Call Control
VoIP
Office Integration
Calendar Free/Busy
Conversation History

Office Communicator 2005
Office Communicator 2005 is the original client for LCS.  Whilst most people will move to MOC 2007, if you’re migrating from LCS during the rollout it might be necessary to have some people using the older client. 

Whist MOC 2005 will work with OCS and OCS R2, there are some limitations.  If you enable Enhanced Presence for the MOC 2005 users in OCS then they won’t be able to connect – as I understand it this is also something that can’t be undone once the user has also logged into MOC 2007.  Also if you’re running OCS R2 you’ll also need to install the December 2008 hotfix package.

Once you have it working, you have access to most of OCS functionality, but updated features like enhanced presence aren’t available.

Apple Mac

Messenger for Mac 7.0.2
If you’re a Mac user, MS provide a pretty decent OCS client in the form of Messenger for Mac.  As well as supporting Live Messenger, this support various flavours of LCS and OCS, with the recent 7.0.2 version and later supporting OCS 2007 R2.

Messenger for Mac supports the majority of OCS and Office Communicator features, including things that were missing from previous versions such as audio and video conferencing, Enhanced Presence, GAL search, and support for federated users.  In fact the only major items not available are support for LiveMeeting sessions, VoIP support and Access Levels for presence.

One thing to note, is that once a user has been enabled for enhanced presence and has logged in using Messenger for Mac 7, they won’t then be able to use version 6 or earlier.

Macs can also use the Web Client described below.

Messenger for Mac can be found here:

Messenger for Mac site

and the product team have provided some good documentation for it here:

Messenger for Mac Deployment Guide

Web Client

Office Communicator Web Access
Communicator Web Access provides a web based interface into OCS for remote workers.  It provides the core functionality of IM and Presence, but OCS R2 extends that functionality significantly.

With R2, web users can use Desktop Sharing sessions.  If you are on a Windows computer then you can launch, view and control sessions, if you’re on a Mac or Linux based box then you’ll only be able to view and take control of a session.

What’s more, if you have telephony configured within your OCS environment, web users can also initiate, receive and control audio conferences.  By providing a the number of a telephone they can use, OCS dials in that phone and connects it to a conference hosted on the A/V Conferencing server.  If an incoming call is received whilst a users is connected to the web client they can use it to redirect the call to an alternative phone.

Another interesting new feature is the ability to provide a Web Client to people who aren’t part of your organisation so that they can join conferences/conversations.  There’s an ‘invite using email’ function that will send them a specific URL that will launch a web client session and join them into the converation.

There are a few other additions with R2 such as the ability to use distribution groups for messages, and support for customising the logon pages with company logos etc.

Windows Mobile

Communicator Mobile (CoMo)
For Windows Mobile MS is provided a pretty decent communicator client, and then improved it further with the R2 release.

CoMo supports all the usual IM and presence functionality, including communication with PIC contacts and distribution groups.  It provides access to the corporate address book, and lets the user initial phone calls to numbers held within it.

The R2 version has a number of improvements to the client, as well as some improvements in interaction with an R2 backend.

On the client side there are a few usability improvements like access to recent contacts and expanding distribution lists.  The R2 version is also a lot more efficient in terms of network usage which contributes to vastly improved battery life over the previous version.

One big advance is the on the voice integration with OCS.  When using the CoMo client to make calls, the client uses the OCS infrastructure to make calls, potentially saving call costs.  It also allows for single number reach, with calls to an OCS desk phone will ring the mobile and will be answerable on the mobile.

When working with an R2 backend presence is also a lot smarter for people using more than one client – for example people with a CoMo phone and OC on their computer.  OCS will determine the most recent activity and use the presence from that device.

CoMo can be downloaded from a Windows Mobile device here.

Apple iPhone

For while now I’ve been keeping an eye out for an OCS client for the Apple iPhone.  As yet I’ve not managed to find an equivalent to Windows Mobiles CoMo, but does appear to be a solution out there if you really have to have one.

WebMessenger seems to provide an iPhone version of their client, though it does looks like you need to install their WebMessenger Server Platform alongside OCS/LCS in order to use it.  So ultimately it’s not that useful.

It looks like the client supports IM, Presence and contact lists, but the information on the website doesn’t go into any detail.

Update:  Since originally writing this post, Modality Systems have released a full iPhone client for OCS.  I’ve written some more on this client here.

RIM Blackberry

Blackberry Client for OCS
If you use Blackberry’s in your organisation RIM has provided a client for OCS.  It provides presence and IM capabilities, though does not support any audio or video conferencing.  It does however integrate into the other Blackberry applications, so you can set your presence from the Home screen, and will show the presence of contract directly from the phones address book.  The client also used the phones spellchecker in IM messages and allows links and phone numbers in messages to be clicked and followed/dialled.

There is also an application that supports the older Live Communications Server.

The application is available here.

Mobile Phones

Office Communicator Mobile for Java
To provide OCS to a wider range of mobile devices the OCS team have now released a Java version of the CoMo client which supports the Nokia S40 and S60 and the Motorola RAZR V3 (though others may work).

The client provides much of the same functionality as the Windows Mobile client, including IM, Presence address book access and single number reach.

Further details can be found here and here, and you can download it onto you phone from getcomo.com.

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Smartphone and iPhone polices in Exchange

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

There’s a lot of well deserved buzz about the Exchange 2010 announcements today, but unfortunately this post is more about the present day versions!

I’ve had a few conversations over the past few weeks about managing mobile devices like smartphones and iPhones.  Many companies now have a lot of phones and PDA’s being used to access email, calendars and contacts.  Now I think this is great news, having consistent access to my calendar and contacts from all my phones is fantastic.  From a company perspective though it can pose some challenges. 

With all those devices wandering around the countryside with copies of mailboxes, attachments, address books etc on them, the risk of loosing something important increases.  So how do you go about managing the things?

Fortunately there are quite a few people out there who can help.  There are a number of products out there that will manage phones, PDA’s smartphones etc.  Some will manage just specific devices and others will look after anything that’s even slightly intelligent.  Depending on your size, you can probably also get these as a managed service from people like Brightpoint, so no need to buy kit of your own. 

These dedicated solutions offer a fantastic amount of control over remote devices, including software distribution even remote control.  But the costs do add up. 

If you’re using Microsoft Exchange and Activesync, another option is to look at the management options that they provide out the box.  Since Exchange 2003 you’ve been able to apply polices to devices that connect to Exchange for mail.  This has the advantage that you can apply policies to all devices that connect to Exchange, including those that might be personal phones (of course you’d need to warn people!).

Whilst Exchange doesn’t offer quite the same level of control as something like Mobile Device Manager or mProdigy, for some it will offer enough for free that the dedicated solutions aren’t necessary.

When this subject first came up at work last year I put this table together that shows what options are available from Exchange 2003 through to Exchange 2007 SP1, and on Windows Mobile and iPhone.  The info came from quite a few places, but I can’t remember exactly where so sorry if anyone recognises a bit of it as theirs! 

Unfortunately the table is too big too wide post here directly, but here’s  a copy of the spreadsheet with the info:

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‘What will be the most widely adopted Enterprise Mobile Device in 2009?’

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

A few people have written about this over the last few days but I thought I’d mention a few things I’ve not seen mentioned elsewhere.

LinkedInPoll

Over on LinkedIn there’s a Poll asking the question ‘What will be the widestly adopted Enterprise Mobile Device in 2009?’.  Although not that scientific (there’s no accounting for whether the respondents are actually in a position to assess or influence the matter) it does pose some interesting questions, for example is the iPhone ready for widespread enterprise adoption?

I reckon it is, but within limits.  For people that just want a smartphone that will access their mailbox, calendar, contacts and the web then I reckon the iPhone does a fantastic job.  It’s not perfect by any means, but for your average  user it’s fine.  It does pretty much everything Windows Mobile can do but with a tad more style, and without the extra infrastructure/services a Blackberry solution would need.

What’s more, by supporting Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol not only does it play nicely with Exchange, it also supports Exchange’s basic device management capabilities (enforce pin codes, remote wipe etc).  That support makes the iPhone a lot more acceptable to corporate IS departments – quite how many use device management is another matter…

Of course if you have existing mobile applications you need to support then the iPhone may not fit quite yet.  But business apps are starting to trickle through onto the App Store (Salesforce, Oracle) and with Apples simple model for publishing and distribution I’m sure many more will follow. 

To me though the key thing the iPhone has in its favour are the end users.  Ultimately to most people, phones and smartphones – even their work ones – are personal devices.  And even as a long time Windows Mobile user I have to say that the iPhone walks all over it’s competition as a phone everyone can use and enjoy. 

I’m still looking forward to seeing Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7.0 though… :)

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If I was Google…

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Google is I giant, there’s no denying that, but one area where they are only just beginning to make inroads is enterprise IT.  It’s pretty obvious this is where they want to be, after all there’s a huge market to be had there.  A market currently dominated by Microsoft and the thousands of partners that the MS ecosystem supports.

On the face of it Google have a pretty good suite of products for business.  It covers pretty much everything you would need in terms of messaging (email, Calendar, Instant Messaging, Conferencing, email security and spam filtering) and collaboration (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, video) with large storage allowances and very competitive pricing at $50 per user per year.  Certainly if you were a new business you’d have pretty much everything you’d need for very little up-front cost.

The pricing of the Google services is key.  $50 dollars per user per year for the fully suite of apps, a mailbox, and 25GB of storage for mail and documents is very cheap.  As a comparison MS’s current hosted Exchange model is $10 per user per month just for a 5GB mail box.  You can bundle in SharePoint, Office Communications Server and Live Meeting for a cost of $15 dollars per user per month, but you’d still need to buy MS Office (or equivalent) for each user.

To my mind there are two main obstacles that Google will need to overcome in order to quickly gain some of the enterprise market. 

First the the concept of having everything in the cloud.  Traditionally companies will have built and managed their own systems for mail, storage, etc.  It’s a big jump to start giving that up and relying on services you can’t see or touch in the cloud.  Fortunately most companies are now becoming more open to this, at least for things that can now be considered as ‘commodity’ services like email.  The current economic climate is, if anything, helping cloud services gain some traction.  Companies will be very reluctant to go spending Capex on new servers.  If a service provider can offer the same or better service , with no capital outlay and vastly reduced operational costs (you don’t need to manage servers you don’t own or host) then that’s a very attractive option.  The arguments for and against cloud computing have been done over and over so I won’t go into them again here. 

The second obstacle for Google, in my view at least, is that most people working for companies now will simply be used to Microsoft Office.  Like it or hate it, Office is the probably the single most important app in many companies.  I know from experience that any suggestion of changing it – even just for a new version – has a very serious change management exercise ahead if it’s going to succeed.  Moving from Office is going to put a lot of people off of going to a Google Apps solution. 

So what would I do?  Well I think Google has a lot going for it in its search for the enterprise market.  Strangely one advantage is that MS themselves are about to change the way people can buy Exchange.  As well as a boxed version you’ll buy and install yourself they’ll be selling it as a hosted/managed service.  So once Exchange 14 arrives people will have to start considering cloud services anyway.  Google need to get themselves positioned in peoples minds as the natural alternative to Exchange 14.  Not only in terms of functionality and cost, but in terms of ease of migration.  For some they already are, but it’s not yet an obvious decision.

To do that I think that they need to do a few things.

  1. Make using Google Mail on the backend completely transparent to Outlook users.  Provide a MAPI interface into Google Mail, and make Outlook on Google Mail supports all the same functionality as Exchange.  Things like delegates on mailboxes and calendars may not be used by most, but those that do use them are likely to be important people and their secretaries.  If your project is going to be seen as a success you want to keep the PA’s happy.  I understand that a MAPI interface is coming, but quite how fully featured I’m not sure.
  2. Provide native support for mobile devices.  Whilst the web and Google mobile clients are good, people are used to using the native inbox, contact and calendar tools on their phones.  POP and IMAP support helps, but ‘Push’ email is often seen as important and support for the MS ActiveSync protocol would tick a lot of boxes, especially for Windows Mobile and iPhone.  Again, I understand it will be available for mail, calendar and contacts at some point this year.
  3. Improve the out-the-box tools that are available for migration and ongoing operations.  Whilst Google’s API’s are very good, and will allow you to do most thing you’d want to do, there don’t seem to be many fully featured tools to help migrate hundreds or thousands of mailboxes or calendars.  Whilst changing Exchange isn’t always simple, it is a known quantity.  Personally I’d like to see Google provide a good toolset and not refer back to API’s.  It’ll help them gain the support of the IT guys on the ground.  Maybe these things exist and I’ve not stumbled across them yet?

If Google can become an accepted host for mailboxes with an Outlook client, it’s then a much smaller jump for companies to start using the wider Google Apps package. 

If as part of your $50 a year mail solution you’ve also got access to 25GB of collaborative document storage and some office apps to work with, you’d have to think very seriously the next time you MS licensing agreement come around. 

Whilst Google Apps isn’t going to be a 100% fit for everyone (even within Google!), there’d be a lot of savings there if a subsection of the user base could get by with Google Apps rather than MS Office.

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More PhotoSynth Goodness, this time on iPhone

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

I’m a bit of a PhotoSynth fan, I think it’s a fantastic technology.  The iPhone has always seemed like an obvious candidate for a viewer, the touch interface seems ideal for it.  Sarah over on on10.net spotted this, and I thought I’d pass it on… A PhotoSynth viewer for the iPhone!

The great news is that the client works really well, you can search for specific synths or topics, and pick from Recent, Most Viewed and ‘Nice and Synthy’ lists.  Once you open up a synth you get the familiar view from one of the camera view points, and can move around the scene from photo to photo.

As well as that though, you can choose to view the point cloud that ties the photos together, and  move and zoom around it in 3D.  It’s hard to explain, but hopefully the screenshots help.  The point cloud is nothing new, you can see it on the PC and Mac views, but it just seems to work better with the iPhone interface.

iSynth Screenshot

 iSynth Point Cloud Screenshot

If you like PhotoSynth it’s a great little app.  It seems the the author Greg Pascale was an intern with the PhotoSynth team at Microsoft last year and he’s written it with the teams approval.  Good stuff!  How about a viewer for XBox?

You can get iSynth for free from the App Store or from iTunes here:

http://www.itunes.com/app/isynth

Greg’s site is here:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/gpascale/iSynth/

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TED, iPhones, app stores and Xbox

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Over the weekend I discovered the TED application for my iPhone.  For those not familiar with TED, it’s a conference in the states that focuses on Technology, Entertainment and Design.  Speakers are invited to talk for 18 minutes on subjects important to them.  There are a huge range of speakers and subjects, from Bill Gates to JJ Abrams.  There really is some fascinating stuff there, its that’s well worth a look.

TED_iPhone

So anyway, I found this iPhone application and spent a few hours on Sunday watching some of the talks.  It struck me what a great idea the application was.  It’s roughly the same content as the TED website, but it just brings the whole thing together in a single app – another good example of software and services. 

Whilst it’s great having this on the iPhone, after a while I did begin to wonder why I was having to watch on a small screen held in my hand.  Why couldn’t I use my television?  Of course I could hook it up to my PC and use the web site, but that’s a lot of hassle and I’ve already got an Xbox there.  Surely I should be able to use that?  It would beat the usual repeats of Friends that seem to make up Sunday afternoon TV during the F1 off season! :)

I couldn’t of course, there’s no app for me to use.  But there should be, not just for TED but YouTube, maybe the BBC iPlayer.  Perhaps a host of other tools that people are used to on the iPhone.  MS are missing a trick here I reckon.  At the moment there’s a huge amount of Software + Services (an MS terminology) innovation happening on the iPhone.  It’s really good stuff, but the device is somewhat limited by the fact it’s a phone.  MS should be making the XBox into the home equivalent.

The XNA Creators Club already goes some way to allow home-brew games, written by the community and published on XBox live.  So the basic infrastructure is there.  They have a well developed development environment (though how suitable it is for non-game applications I don’t know) and a delivery and billing mechanism though XBox Live.  App Stores seem to be the next big thing in the mobile world, but I reckon they could be equally important elsewhere.

I’m using XBox as an example here as I have one, but the same would also apply to the PS3 or Wii – indeed I believe you can already use the iPlayer and YouTube on both.

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Office Communications Server client for iPhone

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

I’m on an Office Communication Server (OCS) course this week so I was just doing a bit of digging around to see what clients are available. 

For Windows there are the usual Office Communicator and Live Meeting clients that will be used by the vast majority of users.  There’s also Messenger for Mac which provides access on Apple clients,  and supports all the IM and conferencing functionality.  For Windows Mobile phones the Communicator Mobile client does presence, IM and integration with the telephoney side of OCS. 

Until today I hadn’t really looked into what other clients were out there.  One interesting one I found is called WebMessenger and provides an LCS and OCS client for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symian, Palm and apparently the iPhone.  It sounds great at first glace, but it seems like it requries additional backend components (I could be wrong, I’ve not gone into any detail).  Not really ideal, quite what they’re doing over and above the standard OCS edge roles I’m not sure.  But, if you need an iPhone or Blackberry client it might be worth a look.

With MS’s recent moves to make their products a little more platform independent, hopefully they’ll port Communicator Mobile to the iPhone at some point.  Whether Apple and the networks will want them to enable all the VoIP telephoney features I don’t know, but just contacts, presence and IM would be useful.

Update:  Since this post another OCS client for iPhone has been released, I’ve written an updated article about it here: iDialog Office Communications Server Client for iPhone

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Back to work…

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

Despite my best efforts to catch the flu, it’s looking like Monday morning will bring with it my first working week of 2009 (booooo!).  It’s  set to be a busy start of the year, with quite a lot of projects and work carrying over from December.  As well as the big Enterprise Architecture project I’ve been working on there are a host of smaller things that will be taking up my time.

I’ll be following up with Apple and O2 on the iPhone Exchange ActiveSync issues we’ve been seeing.  Hopefully now we have some repeatable scenarios we can provide to Apple we’ll be able to help fix the issues.

There’s some ongoing work to streamline our supply chain for desktop (and laptop) computers.  This has been hanging around for months and although nothing is actually ‘broken’ there’s a general feeling that we can do even better.  We should be able to work with our suppliers to cut some slack from the supply process and with any luck cut some costs at the same time.  In truth this isn’t strictly my job anymore, but as it’s what I used to look after I’m giving the guys a helping hand.  Plus it should put us in really good stead for the Desktop/Windows 7 work we have pencilled in over the next year.

By far the most varied – and time consuming – chunk of work is the ongoing programme of work my team has put together for the remainder of the 2008 FY and 2009.  Ensuring the these projects make a successful transition from our drawing board into actual working projects is incredibly important.  Our project guys are all pretty good, but there’s a lot of projects to keep track of.  One thing we need to do better is to both better publicise – and ‘market’ -  the roadmap of work coming up (and it’s implications/benefits) and also ensure the we have a clearer view of the status of the programme and it’s component projects.  Again nothing is broken as such, but I’m a stickler for the details and making things better! :)  Fortunately some of this ties in nicely with the Enterprise Architecture so I should be able to bring it all together into something more consistent.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get my hands dirty in a few more technical projects this year as well.  Whilst I enjoy the higher level architecture work, I do miss the more immediate satisfaction of getting a script to run or seeing your freshly installed system work for the first time.  I won’t get too much time for this, but if I pick the right projects I’ll be able to get stuck in.  We’re doing some good work on the development side with Agile working, it’d be great to try and translate some of this into the more infrastructure related projects that are my background.

So a busy January awaits… It’s good fun work, but I’m still not looking forward to the alarm clock going off at 6am on Monday!

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Seadragon makes it to iPhone

Monday, December 15th, 2008

iPhone Seadragon view on a Photosynth setiPhone Seadragon zoom into a Photosynth setiPhone Seadragon zoom into a Photosynth set

I’m probably a bit late with this news but I noticed at the weekend that Microsoft have released an iPhone application for their Seadragon technology.

I’ve posted about Seadragon and it’s partner in crime Photosynth quite a lot in the past so I won’t go into detail about the technology itself (try here and here for that), but the iPhone application does go some way to showing the potential Seadragon has.

At the moment the app is able to access content from the Photosynth site, any Seadragon RSS feed (though I’m yet to work out what these are…) and any DeepZoom composer files.  It also comes with access to some example content such as maps – which interestingly also use the iPhones location awareness to show your position on them.

Whilst the app does a good job, I’d hope and suspect that it’s very much our first view of things to come.  At the moment for example although the app can open images from PhotoSynth ‘synths’, it doesn’t present them in their full 3D glory.  Hopefully in future this functionality will be added as it would seem to suit the Smartphone/iPhone form factor and interface perfectly.

I’m also interested to see what the Seadragon RSS feeds are.  I’ve not had a good look into it yet, but I can’t see anything about them on Seadragon.com.  I’d imaging they are similar to the RSS feeds you can import into PhotoZoom.  Hopefully I’ll be able to point it into my flickr account and it’ll Seadragon up my pictures!

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