Taking Your New iPad 2 to Work: Mission Impossible?
http://gigaom.com/apple/bringing-your-new-ipad-2-to-work/
Over at GigaOm, you’ll find a basic article on how to configure your new iPad 2 for work. They echo the IT trend of “bring your own everything”, including your iPad, to work. However, the article is clearly small business focused as they assume it is generally easy to connect to secured WiFi networks via hand typed passcodes and the apps recommended exist in silos, independent of the knowledge contained within your corporation.
For enterprise users, installing certificates for enterprise WPA2, IPSEC, or even secure VPN access is mission impossible unless you have help from your IT department. Apple provides instructions for IT Departments to provision servers to deploy these certificates and to configure VPNs to automatically start when corporate URLs are used, but in many cases these servers aren’t deployed or aren’t accessible to personal devices. In some enterprises, you can find a local user group or email alias that helps new Apple users get their devices hooked up to their enterprise infrastructure. In others, you are still out of luck connecting to the enterprise network.
Adding an Exchange account to your iPad or iPhone is easy but you need to remember you have implicitly given your IT department permission to wipe your entire device if it gets lost or if you leave your job. Make sure you back up often by connecting to iTunes. Additionally, your Exchange server can force a PIN code to access your device for your personal data in addition to your corporate Exchange email which can get in the way of quick access to your phone.
We still see there’s a long way to go before personal devices are safe and usable for work in the enterprise. The big problems we see are:
1) Connecting to the enterprise network and enterprise infrastructure
2) Finding and connecting to your co-workers
3) Ensuring corporate apps & data are protected and controlled by your corporation
4) Ensuring your private apps & data remains private and controlled by you
At Moprise, we’re working towards empowering users with the apps they need to make personal devices in a corporate world actually work. We will empower users with the apps they need to route around the impediments and get work done. Our free iPad and iPhone apps enable anyone to access SharePoint and were our first steps in unblocking user productivity.
Stay tuned for an exciting new set of apps & services that will be a tremendous advance in how enterprise users connect and collaborate.
Follow us @moprise to keep in touch.
