Today's Top Stories Microsoft this week backed up its enterprise mobility vision with some concrete products announced at its TechEd North American conference. Redmond displayed a range of new mobile and cloud initiatives designed to entice enterprise customers. On the mobile side, Microsoft is expanding its previously announced Enterprise Mobility Suite to include a preview of Microsoft Azure Remote App and Intune-Office 365 integration set for later this year. Microsoft is previewing Azure RemoteApp, which provides mobile employees access to Windows apps across a range of devices, including those running Mac OS X, iOS and Android. "Combining Microsoft's powerful Remote Desktop Services capabilities with the scale and cost-efficiencies of Microsoft Azure, RemoteApp will help end users stay productive on the go and enable IT to easily scale and meet customer needs," the company explained in a release. Azure RemoteApp puts Microsoft into competition in offering remote access with Citrix, VMware and Amazon, which recently released its remote access Workspaces earlier this year, notes The Register. In addition, Microsoft plans to launch Office 365 mobile app management with its Windows Intune cloud management product across Office for iPad, iPhone and Android phones. Intune will also provide a way for customers to manage existing iOS and Android line of business apps. "The combination of Office 365 capabilities and the Enterprise Mobility Suite is truly magic, delivering the absolute best experience for protected mobile productivity with the level of security and control IT requires," says Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Windows Server and Systems Center. The company is also previewing Visual Studio tooling for the Apache Cordova platform, enabling app developers to build multi-device hybrid mobile apps using HTML and JavaScript. Using Visual Studio, developers can now build Windows, iOS and Android native apps with .NET and Xamarin or hybrid apps with Apache Cordova. In addition, Microsoft announced a number of cloud initiatives, including private connections to the cloud through Azure Express Route, streamlined cloud storage, cloud-based application programming interface management, cloud-based disaster recovery, an anti-malware agent for cloud services and virtual machines, enhanced cloud encryption and stronger data loss prevention for the cloud. "The future of mobile-first, cloud-first is here, and we're excited to bring the technology, support and experience that will help IT, developers and technology users alike thrive in this time of great change," Anderson concludes.
For more:
- check out Microsoft's release
- see Anderson's statement
- read The Register report
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| This week's sponsor is CA Technologies. |  | Webinar: Rethinking Enterprise Mobility Management – Beyond BYOD
Thursday, May 29th, 12pm ET / 9am PT Our panel of experts will help you understand how to develop effective strategies that accelerate mobility transformation and prepare your organization for the mobile future. Register Today! |
If there is anything certain about bring-your-own-device policies, it is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for organizations. As noted in a customer panel at the Citrix Synergy conference in Anaheim, Calif., last week, BYOD policies come in many forms depending on the organization and its security and culture. But as noted in an article at TechTarget, whatever the particulars are of the policy, IT should "go with a mobile device management (MDM) approach that locks down an employee device or use mobile application management (MAM) to secure the data used in enterprise applications." Some organizations are also learning that BYOD programs may not need to cast a wide net throughout the workforce. Indeed, Sony Pictures Entertainment has greatly reduced the number of users in its BYOD program from several hundred to fewer than 100, the article says. "We're struggling to include more and more people because they don't like the security language," Sony Pictures Entertainment director of IT mobile technologies Laurie Elmore was quoted. "Security is saying, 'if you leave, I can take your device, I can copy your pictures and text messages." The panel discussion also noted that different laws may impact BYOD programs, either within specific states or countries. As an example, the article says that German laws don't allow electrical utilities company EnBW to lock onto a device with full MDM control. So the utility is solely focused on an MAM approach. "We just want to take control of the applications we deliver and what the content of the applications is," Boris Schroeder, team lead for IT mobile solutions at EnBW was quoted. Another interesting revelation from the panel discussion was that Citrix finds fewer security incidents with BYOD devices than with corporate-owned devices. Michael McKiernan, vice president of business technology solutions for IT practices at Citrix, was quoted as calling this phenomenon the "rental car syndrome"--meaning people take care of their own devices better than they do the ones owned by the company. "They lose [BYOD devices] less frequently, they get run over by cars less frequently, they get dropped in the water less frequently when the new phone comes out," McKiernan says.
Read more:
- check out the TechTarget article
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Through two avenues--direct viewership and social interaction--mobile devices are helping to digitally resurrect big top events. Marketers and producers are taking notice and determining how to turn yearly televised affairs into veritable spectacles. As far as over-the-top goes, few outpace the Olympics. Nielsen announced last week it teamed with NBCUniversal to track the multi-platform audience of this year's events in Sochi to gauge the exposure of five national ad campaigns. The consumer tracking company looked at the advertising efforts across three platforms--television, online and mobile--to determine their respective reaches. While the firm expects to release the numbers later this year, it said digital video viewing on the whole had doubled in 2013, and the company is planning on adding mobile reach to its reports in the third quarter. "We're living in a cross-platform world," says Megan Clarken, global product leader at Nielsen. "Whether you're 45, living in Boise and watching on your big screen or a 19-year-old tuning in from your smartphone at a Starbucks in Atlanta, we need to be able to capture your ad exposure." While the consumption of media through mobile offers a new platform for content creators, it's the potential of the second screen as a supplement to unifying events that will especially drive viewership and engagement, according to Mat Honan at Wired. Live performances allow instant reaction, something heretofore lost with television. Now, in the age of Twitter and Instagram, retweets and hashtags provide the digital "oohs and aahs." "Television has talked to us for decades, but it never listened," Honan says. "While we all watched events like the moon landing at the same time, we did so in pockets of isolation." With social networks, there's a sense of community and getting in on the action, a phenomenon that led this year's social savvy Oscars to reach its highest ratings in 14 years. "Today the conversation is the event: The highlight of the show is what happens simultaneously on another screen. It's experiential synchronicity," Honan observes.
For more:
- read this Mobile Marketer article about the Nielsen/NBCUniversal project
- read the Wired article about the second screen
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