Hello from somewhere near Stratford Connecticut. I am on the Acela Express, you know the train known in other parts of the world as the TGV that takes 3h45 to get to NYC from Boston. Did you know that the very same train will go from Paris to Bruxelles (same distance) in 75 minutes? Go Amtrak! The good news is that the extra 150 minutes afford me the opportunity to reflect on today’s sessions and some of the meetings I had with enterprise mobility vendors.
I was asked at the last second to participate on a second panel this morning. The end-user’s perspective on enterprise mobility. While I am not an IT manager or a CIO, I have the good fortune of speaking to many of them on a regular basis, so I felt comfortable with my ability to speak to the subject in at least a semi-intelligent fashion. The panel took a lot of different turns (some, candidly unexpected), but the net net of that session is that companies remain confused and challenged with mobility. That’s understandable, by the way, because it’s not easy. However, organizations need to do a better job of developing a policy guide, as well as a general mobility strategy that includes.as many internal stake holders as possible (without having too many chefs in the kitchen).
In any case….this is not the purpose of the post! Focus Philippe, focus! Once the conference was over, I made my way to Penn Station to catch the aforementioned Acela. There, I bumped into a vendor who, like me, had been at Interop all day and deserved (again, like me) a beer. We started talking about mobility management (big surprise) and something dawned upon me. Mobility management would be a LOT easier – or at the very least a lot LESS difficult - if the handset manufacturers (outside of RIM) did their own part to be good corporate citizens. Don’t call me crazy just yet.
Handset manufacturers spend a considerable amount of time trying to make the greatest user experience possible so that they can sell as many devices as possible to consumers. As an added benefit, they include ActiveSync support so that you can easily hook up your work email and start downloading mail to your heart’s content.
That’s great. Let’s give a shout out for the consumerization of enterprise mobility! Too bad the vendors haven’t fully embraced it. Take a look at it from this perspective. Exchange 2007 supports 50 policies that can be pushed out to devices via ActiveSync (yes, well below the BES’ 450, but that’s not the point). How many do the various other platforms support today? Let's take a look:
- Symbian (can't find it but I know it's not a lot)
- Apple – 12 (give or take)
- Palm – 6
- Android – 0. Goose Egg.
- Windows Mobile – 50
So, of the 5 major non BlackBerry platforms, only ONE has chosen to support all the policies available in Exchange. Imagine how life in enterprise mobility would be different if the other platform makers chose to fully support and enable all 50 policies built in to Exchange.
What do you think? Would this change the game? How so?
