Marco Nielsen at myITforum.com

End-User Tip #1 – How to conference call on the run

For many corporate environments, end-user education on new technologies is the most difficult. Usually e-mails, intranet, webinars, help desk and word-of-month are all components of a successful implementation of new technology.  Even though mobile devices have been part of corporate culture for a while now they are no exception. :-)

I will attempt from time to time to post useful ideas that could be used in a corporate environment from a perspective of an enterprise admin that manages a large number of mobile devices.

Conference Calling

In most corporate environments today you will have the need to gather several employees on the dreaded conference bridge of your flavor. The setup and scheduling can vary from vendor to vendor, and many even have internal bridge solutions.

Meeting requests are sent out to the relevant employees and you will see a huge number of business people using their mobile devices to take these calls while traveling or outside of their corporate office (if they even have a physical office anymore).

For the busy business person it can be painful to remember the conference bridge number and PIN or access codes used by dozens of fellow employees. These can take the form of:

+1-800-555-5555 PIN 12345678
+4597979797 Code 123456

Most smartphones will pick up on the phone numbers and make it easy to dial it, but then you usually have to memorize the PIN or access code.

The tel URL scheme

Luckily for us some smart people (it appears from Nokia) way back in 2000 took the idea to extend the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) ideas from the internet and add the “tel”, “fax”, and “modem” scheme. Much in the some way we use “http”, “https”, and “ftp” in our web sites today for links.  Please see the original RFC2806 and the later RFC3966 for all the gory details.

So today many web browsers natively support these URIs schemes as well. And this goes down to the mobile device level, with for example Mobile Internet Explorer and Safari. Blackberry and Symbian devices appear to support it natively as well.

The main one we are interested in for this exercise is the “tel:” URI.

How to set it up

So to use this it’s more of educating the end-users who setup the conference calls to use the proper formatting in the meeting invitations.  If using Outlook and using HTML formatting, as soon as you type in a string with “TEL:” and number behind it will automatically make it a hyperlink. Many may already be familiar with this as well for desktop SIP/VoIP solutions such as Microsoft’s, as it will use your Communicator client and dial the number in the TEL: URL.

Most phone systems will also honor the “,” character as being a 1 sec pause. So you could after the TEL: URL place the conference bridge phone number and the PIN/access code and the “#” symbol all in one string.

Some examples: – please note no spaces should be used!
TEL:1-800-555-5555,12345678#
TEL:+1-555-555-5555,,12345#,1

How to use it

On the mobile device it will render the TEL: string on the screen and it most cases (depending on the string, device platform, device software) make it a hyperlink that the end-user can click on and have the phone immediately dial out the string!  No need to memorize the PIN/access code in most cases!

This can really be a “life saver” for the mobile professional. You can forego the need to perhaps write down the PIN/access code etc. Of course I don’t recommend trying to dial into a conference while driving a vehicle, but I’m sure many of your users probably have and then this could literally be a life saver as well..

Screen shots - and gotchas

Windows Mobile 6.5.5 device - nice and easy to dial the complete string from your calendar:
 
(screen shot captured by using MyMobiler)

BlackBerry Bold - Easy to use as expected: 

(screen shot captured by using SnapScreen)

iPhone 3GS – a major gotcha where in the calendar it doesn’t seem supported, where as in Safari it is. :-(   However, automatic detection of standalone number strings does take place.
(Screen capture using the built-in feature available since 2.0)

Palm Pre webOS 1.3.1 – Also here the Tel: schema is having issues where it doesn’t know where to end the hyperlink. Advise here would be make sure no text is after the string.
 
(Using the orange-symbol-P key trick for screen capture)

Recommendation and recap

Based upon the information gathered on the platforms I had at hand above, my recommendation if your environment has all of them is to communicate conference bridge instructions to embed the following example in the end-users invitations so most platforms are catered to and usable:

Direct conference bridge access:
TEL:1-800-555-5555,12345678#

Manual dialing instructions:
1-800-555-5555
Passcode: 12345678#

I hope this may help some corporate situations and employees make better use out of their devices and each others!  It clearly shows that if you do notify your users about this feature make sure you understand the platforms in use and the differences you may encounter supporting them.. 

If someone has a Symbian and Android device/emulator it would be interesting to see the results from those platforms too!  Also if folks have various VoIP/SIP implementations other gaps that may be found there..

|\\arco..

Google Mobile Device Management

A colleague of mine, Chris De Herrera, recently made me notice a really nice overview write up that eWeek did on the newer features now available in their paid Google Apps Premier offering..

It really makes it clear that the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol is the de-facto standard for remote e-mail synchronization. I assume through the corporate licensing of the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol and also more public openness on the inner workings of protocol we are seeing more and more implementations that support it.

As announced in early February these basic ActiveSync features are supported that most mobile platforms support:

Push-To-Talk features for Blackberry, and perhaps any Smartphone?

I continue to learn something new everyday and was ignorantly unaware of RoIP (Radio-over-IP) technology as perhaps many others are as well.. :-) Something caught my eye about this interesting solution that currently brings Blackberry devices onto the same network as other RoIP end-point devices, such as other 2-way radios used by many companies, agencies and municipalies.

I think this could be a great feature for many implementations of smartphones (granted Blackberry only supported for now by this vendor as a proof-of-concept), where a tie-in with another communications network would make the device even more useful and reduce the need for additional communication devices..

References:
http://connectedplanetonline.com/3g4g/news/twisted-pair-creates-two-way-blackberries-0310/
http://www.twistpair.com/index/news-app/story.954

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Running Android 2.1 on an AT&T Tilt/HTC 8925 Kaiser

With all the activity about Android running on several of the older Windows Mobile HTC devices and waiting for AT&T here in the states to start to carry Android devices in March, I couldn’t wait anymore to give one of them a try. :-)

For “fun” I took my stock AT&T Tilt (KAIS100) from 2007 (which feels like such a lifetime ago in mobile phone years!) and proceed to read through all the various posts and steps necessary. After some trial and error I did finally make a breakthrough and had Android 2.1 successfully up and running on my old Tilt. Current beta release is a “NAND” ROM based flash, and not the previous HaRET software running on top of Windows Mobile available since last fall. Thus a bit speedier and quite useable and no need to partition a tricky SD card on a Linux OS!

Warning!

<DISCLAIMER> By no means am I recommending folks to do this to their devices, as there are risks that you could “brick” the device. I also wouldn’t call this a supported device by any corporate means. I also don’t endorse illegal activity with copyrighted material. To my knowledge at this time the material mentioned is not illegal. </DISCLAIMER>
I’m merely curious on how far the mobile “community” at large has gotten with Android OS customizations, since so much is open sourced and available. For other more supported Android devices (Nexus One, HTC Dream/Magic) there are also others supplying hacked/modified ROMs.

How to do it

For the Tilt, I had to perform the HardSPL, CID unlock and SIM unlock (I believe the latter is optional, but I was on a roll). I also upgraded the radio firmware to the one supported by the Android “polymod” build I was looking at trying out. It’s been tweaked for several months by someone that goes by the handle of “polyrhythmic” on the XDA forum.

The steps necessary are laid out several places, but I had to read up on the full thread(s) to better understand some of the context. After the unlocking steps, I flashed the device from a SD card and had to press the D-pad key at the right time to process with selecting the Install of the OS. Take the battery out and back in and patiently wait for the OS to come up for the first time.

Regarding which LCD Panel and resolution to use I first tried a 320x480 ROM with bad results, then noticed others having good luck with this 320x428 file.

Getting Screen Shots

After getting it up and running I installed the latest Android SDK and got the DDMS (Dalvik Debug Monitor) up and running with the Windows USB driver. It takes a few minutes after you tether the device for it to show up in the debugger. But then you can snag the screen shots you want. I need to see if our old buddy Koushik’s Screenshot tool works on this hacked build.

Overall

Overall, I was impressed by the capabilities my old Tilt had gotten. Not 100% yet, but I can see the Android activity on the XDA forum has not lessen and only continues to increase.

Very impressive what some members have done to get newer operating systems running on legacy hardware that is no longer supported by vendors.. But also a note that you shouldn’t also expect 100% functionality or compatibility. Currently the Bluetooth and camera functions don’t work on the Tilt and the battery life is questionable. The screen is also rather small and hard to read. But if you can live with 85%+, have patience for some delays, and love to tinker with technology hacks this is for you. :-)

Android in the Enterprise

The Exchange ActiveSync support is fairly barebones but included none the less in Android 2.1. I await for more full fledged Android devices hitting the market shortly to see how the corporate mobile landscape may change by year’s end. Several 3rd party ActiveSync clients are now also commercial available to fill some of the void left behind the Google native implementation. I think more features are necessary before a full fledged enterprise would feel secure..

PS. Please don’t ask me questions on how do perform this or what to do if you brick your device. Please see the links above and ask the experts on the forums instead. :-)

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mobileX Conference – Chicago – March 5, 2010

Just a quick plug for a local conference I will be speaking at this week. Should be exciting and very interesting! I will be speaking on the topic of enterprise customer solutions and how to generate value.

“MobileX is a one day conference for entrepreneurs, investors, developers, industry professionals, and mobile enthusiasts that identifies opportunities, explores solutions, and provides technical education in the mobile & related industries.”

Who is the conference for:
* Entrepreneurs (current & aspiring)
* Investors (Angels & VC's)
* Developers
* Industry professionals
* Mobile enthusiasts

Friday, March 05, 2010 from 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM (CT)
Doubletree
300 E. Ohio Street
Chicago, IL 60611

For more information and to register please see: http://www.mobilexconference.com/chicago/

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WM 6.1/6.5 Device Patch for SCMDM Slow Down Issues

Some of the folks over at the SCMDM Forum have been discussing device issues after they are enrolled in SCMDM. Several customers opened Microsoft Support tickets on the issues and Microsoft has now a hotfix to hopefully get rid of the woes.  Some customers are already stating good success with the patch.

You can find the patch information here and download it:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=979220

I would highly recommend testing it on specific models that are having the problem before deployment en-masse to all your enrolled devices.

BTW, There was also another hotfix rollup patch released for SCMDM 2008 RTM last month to fix 4 specific issues. You can find it here if you haven’t already upgraded to SCMDM 2008 SP1: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=976623.

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Office Mobile 2010 Beta for Windows phone – Whats new and exciting

Arguably one of the strongest features of the Windows Mobile (aka Windows phone, which I still can’t get used to) platform is it’s integration, support and feature matching of the Microsoft Office suite. This is a highly desired feature for most corporate enterprise customers and a good chunk of consumers. This still stands true today and it appears that Microsoft is taking steps to continue to build and improve on this with their Office Mobile 2010 plans.

This week on the Windows Marketplace for Mobile the beta version of the new Office Mobile 2010 was made available on devices running Windows Mobile 6.5. The same week that the full blown Office 2010 beta was made public as well in both x86 and x64 versions. 

The previous Office Mobile 6.1 (also available on the Marketplace for WM 5.0 w/MSFP and above), was released back in 2007 together with the Windows Mobile 6.1 launch. It supplied support for the new Office 2007 file formats. The Office Mobile 6.1 home page is here, and FAQ.

This Office Mobile 2010 beta copy will expire on April 5th, 2010, and it is unknown how the final release will be licensed. We can only hope that Microsoft makes it available to the broadest audience possible.

So what is new?

A quick marketing run-down is available in “The Top 10 benefits of Office Mobile 2010” is posted here.

Also interesting to note in the video presentation of “What’s New in Microsoft Office Mobile 2010” by Dev Balasybramanian is the mention of “Mobile Document Viewers” that can be used on almost any mobile device, including iPhone and Blackberry. I believe this is in reference to the general SharePoint 2010 mobile support as detailed here.

Installation from Marketplace

Details on the beta:

Was painless and easy:
 

After the reboot, nice new icons are available:

I will quickly go through each application and give some highlights. Of course this could all change as this is a beta public release. But usually the Microsoft public releases are feature complete and just bug fixes remain.

Word Mobile 2010 beta

Functional appears to be exactly the same as the 6.1 version from what I could tell:

Excel Mobile 2010 beta

I was unable to quickly see any new menu features in the product. So if Microsoft is stating that is some new supported formulas I would have to take their word on it. :-)

PowerPoint Mobile 2010 beta

The options appear to be the same as in the previous release, but the landscape right and left-handed have disappeared..

One of the first changes I noticed is the missing menu triangle which used to appear on screen, and when pressed displayed the application menu. There is now a nice clean look, and the same finger swipe gestures can be used. An automatic timeout removes the top and bottom lines of the screen so the slide is full-screen. If you press and hold down on the screen, a smaller menu appears to assist in the slide deck movement.

The rest of the functions appear to be same, with the exception of the new “Presentation Companion” option. This requires a bluetooth pairing to a computer running the same PowerPoint slide deck and lets you control the presentation from the phone!  Now, this is not something new for the Windows Mobile platform as back in 2008 the Windows SideShow for Windows Mobile was released and various information can be found on how that works.

If you select “Email steps” on the bottom left of the screen a nice feature lets you e-mail the on screen steps to yourself or others:

The 4-step instructions are as follows:

“Presentation Companion allows you to deliver a presentation on your computer from your Windows® phone. To use Presentation Companion, do the following:
1.If you haven't installed Presentation Companion on your computer, install it from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165847.
2. On your computer, open the presentation, and, on the ribbon, click the Add-Ins tab, and then click Presentation Companion.
3. On your phone, open the presentation, tap Menu, and then tap Presentation Companion.
4. Use the wizard on your phone to connect to your computer.”

The 6.2Mb installation of Presentation Companion 1.0 Beta is painless and requires no reboot (love it when that is the case). It does install some additional Office and .Net Framework components in my case, running Office 2007. This proves a point that you don’t need Office 2010 beta to use this feature.

Once the pre-requisites are installed the actual installation of the tool can begin:

After installation I pulled up the deck I wanted to control in my PowerPoint 2007 and got this prompt for the new add-in:

And did see the new addition in Add-Ins ribbon:

I clicked Start and was prompted to setup Bluetooth:

My Toshiba notebook wasn’t too happy with the Bluetooth stack when I answered yes, so I decided to pair up the phone, from the phone instead. Clicked Next and then Add Computer (still in PowerPoint Mobile 2010). After searching and typing in the PIN on both sides it paired up successfully!  In the mean time I updated my Toshiba bluetooth stack from here, and it still failed to work. Then I found Steve “fyiguy” Hughes excellent idea to install and use the Microsoft IntelliPoint drivers and that finally worked like a charm:

Now with the same PowerPoint files open on both devices, I have a powerful companion for my presentations. The notes for each slide will be displayed on the Windows phone, and I can navigate and control the slides on the computer from my phone!

If you select “Clicker Slide Show” the slide notes are not shown, and instead the slide itself on the phone. Pretty slick. The only thing I felt was missing was a cursor or mouse arrow that I could highlight on the slides during a presentation.

Supposely the PowerPoint Mobile 2010 now has supported for rendering of SmartArt graphics. But in my test it appeared to fail to render it in the same way as on my computer. I hope fewer failures and missed graphics than I have seen on Office Mobile 6.1, where at times it has crashed and burned on me but more testing is of course needed.. So far it appears very stable, but I’m not sure which SmartArt graphics it supports..

OneNote Mobile

This client appears to to be the almost the same version as the one supplied in Office Mobile 6.1 back in 2007 (which had Build 12.0.4518.1055). It also doesn’t bear the “beta” word it’s in title, so I’m guessing it is fairly untouched compared to the others in the suite.

SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 beta

I don’t have a SharePoint 2010 Beta setup running, so I couldn’t fully test the SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 beta client. Perhaps others could comment on this and their findings?

Looks like it has some nice features to sync information back and forth from SharePoint. Together with the possibility to edit documents from SharePoint and save them back this indeed could appeal to many enterprise customers with employees on the go..

Outlook Mobile 2010

Although not in the Office Mobile 2010 beta installation. A new client is available together with the Exchange 2010 launch. It is already included on the Window Mobile 6.5 devices, and available for Windows Mobile 6.1 devices here.

Please see my previous posting on Exchange 2010 and mobility here for more details.

What’s Exciting

As a recap, the PowerPoint Mobile Presenter Companion is definitely something new for the Office Mobile suite. And the SharePoint Mobile client gives additional benefits to view, and modify your SharePoint document libraries when on the go. Outlook Mobile is near and dear to the heart of most Windows Mobile users and not surprising more tied to the Exchange server release cycle than Office Mobile.

Old staples such as Excel Mobile and Word Mobile appear to be felt alone and perhaps a good thing at this time. So I wouldn’t call this a major release of the Office Mobile suite, but maybe a update to keep it refreshed in the new Windows Mobile 6.5 and Marketplace world it now has.

Time will tell if and how a perhaps greater refresh of the Office Mobile suite will occur around the timeline of Windows Mobile 7.0..

Future Support

On my wish-list I would like to see:

LiveMeeting - Cisco WebEx is has already been available for the iPhone since January.. Why couldn’t a LiveMeeting Mobile client be created? I’m guessing that next Office Communication Server 2010 will bring more LiveMeeting features.. We can only hope that mobility is more a part of that as they have done successfully in the Office Communicator Mobile client.

Visio – Why not port the Visio 2010 Viewer over to Windows Mobile?

Project – With Project 2010 Server being installed on-top of SharePoint I wonder if any mobility features are being thought of there..

Nokia - With the Nokia partnership announced back in August, and the pending release of Office Mobile 2010 after the beta cycle, will this mean that the Nokia/Symbian release is next up?

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Windows Marketplace for Mobile for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1

One of my colleagues, Don Sorcinelli, gave me a heads up that the Marketplace client for the down-level older Windows Mobile 6.0 and Windows Mobile 6.1 devices is now available.  The Marketplace client is embedded in all the Windows Mobile 6.5 devices.

Text message of the download link if you are in the United States:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/downloads/get-marketplace.mspx 
Download link to be used on the mobile device:
http://mp.windowsphone.com

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Windows Marketplace for Mobile – Now accessible on the web, and the competition

As I blogged about previously in my Step-by-Step Introduction of Windows Marketplace for Mobile, all the features at that time where only available from your handset device.

Now, as previously announced by Microsoft, the online “desktop” web version of the service is now also available as noted in the media.  I will breifly go through the different features and also recap with a nice comparison to the other application store fronts available on the marketplace today..

Windows Marketplace for Mobile on the web

The main login page is here: http://marketplace.windowsphone.com. And looks like this once you have signed on with your Live account:

You can easily drill down into any application and see the details, reviews and screenshots.

Features

Perhaps the most interesting is if you click on the “Purchase History” label at the top you can visually see all of your previous purchases, freebie or otherwise:

You can drill down into each purchase and see the additional details:

The “Account Settings” tab brings up an easy to use place to change your payment preferences. You can have different ones either for the phone or the web site.

The “Community” link brings you over to the Windows phone Forums, where there is also one for the Marketplace.

Filtering

Without signing into your Live account, or if you have never setup Marketplace on your Windows Mobile device(s) you can still view all the applications available. You can filter the available application for the 2 device types, Professional (touch screen), or Standard (non-touch screen) in the top right hand corner of the screen:

Language Selection

One last perhaps interesting tidbit I noticed, is that if you don’t sign-in you can actual select which language filter you wish to display the available Marketplace applications. In the bottom right corner there is a “Select Catalog” drop down:

Perhaps interesting to see the differences in the amount of available applications in certain languages just like they have been reported on the portable devices..

Quick Comparison to 7 Competitors

In the world of mobile application store fronts the monetary success of Apple’s iTunes store simply can not be ignored. So not just the operating system vendors are jumping on this bandwagon. Many mobile operators, and now OEM’s are also getting onboard. More competition is usually healthy for the consumer or enterprise customer. So it is definitely interesting times we are in. :-)

Apple

The Apple iPhone folks actually have multiple avenues nicely packaged for them:

Web Apps: http://www.apple.com/webapps/ – Provides an overview of some of the 1700+ applications you don’t have to install on the iPhone, but uses a plain Internet URL to access them. Most are optimized for the specific iPhone screen size and Safari browser.

iTunes Store: http://www.apple.com/itunes/ – No native web interface to access the store. You must install the iTunes application, but can browse without a configured device. With it’s 100,000+ applications for the iPod Touch/iPhone the current defacto leader inthe mobile space. The newer Genius feature, where application picks based upon your current installation of application is very clever and surprising attractive..

For another interesting view of the iTunes App Store, be sure to check out the “App Store Wall”. Originally shown at the Apple WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) in the summer of 2009. It provides a live view of the top 20,000 applications and their live activity of purchases on twenty 30” monitors. Better screen shots here. It is now on display at Apple’s Cupertino, CA corporate office in the main lobby..

Blackberry

The RIM Blackberry folks have the launched their “Blackberry App World” earlier this year. It has a nice open web access to view it’s contents as well: http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/.

Several different filters and views to drill down into the applications you are interested in. A nice touch is the RSS feed on the featured applications.

Android

The Android Market web site appears not to be a full view into all the available applications. Just the featured, and top paid and free applications are highlighted. For the free applications, they can be filtered by 16 sub-categories.

Only screenshots and a brief description are made available. Hopefully some more development and feature will be added in the near future. Only a few months in life it clearly needs some more work..

Nokia

Nokia lunched it’s application store front back in May of 2009. It’s called “Ovi Store”, and was supposely launched with more than 20,000 applications in it’s back pocket to give it a boost from the get-go. Looking at the other platforms, probably not a bad decision for a mature platform to get it going.

However the web interface is not geared for desktop web viewing, even though it does pulls up in a fairly readable way: https://store.ovi.com/.

Ovi is already a cloud service for the Nokia platform, much like Apple’s MobileMe, or Microsoft’s MyPhone services. Nokia is also dabbling in the multimedia space with their own Nokia Music Store.

webOS

The Palm webOS application store is named “Palm App Catalog”. Tied to the public SDK releases for the operating system the App Catalog is coming up with a slow start it appears. Full support for paid apps appears to be coming up in December, where more developers and companies might have been waiting for to gain access into this well thought out platform.

No direct web accessible version of the Palm App Catalog so far, without using a webOS device itself. Although the application page on Palm’s web site gives a good glimpse of the top featured applications in 16 different categories.

The newly available Palm Pixi device running webOS does indeed look interesting and may push this platform into the application boom it probably deserves..

Samsung

Samsung is calling their own version simply “Application Store”. Limited to the United Kingdom, Italy and France at this time. Perhaps not a global or even regional play at this point in time, but shows their interest and willingness to have a full fledge “store” solution.

Samsung is borrowing heavily from the Apple playbook and created their own iTunes type application they are calling “Samsung Kies”.  Installed on your desktop you can sync applications and browse for applications. On the device side, it appears they are catering this mainly to the Omnia line of devices running Windows Mobile at this time. But Samsung is a multi-platform OEM company and has not been shy to announce future Android and Symbian handsets coming out soon.

Verizon

One of the first larger mobile operators (United States-wise) to go public this summer that they want to have their own branded store front on their devices is Verizon.  They are adding a new twist to this new frontier that only their own application store will be initially made available on the handsets sold by them to their customers. Customers can download and install the vendor store application (RIM, Microsoft, etc) but this is again a sign of the monetary gains at stake with mobile applications and stores.

The “VZAppZone” is already live and appears only Windows Mobile and RIM devices have been supported in the beginning.

BTW, for consumer LG devices sold by Verizon there is a whole other “Media Store” where ringtones, music, games, applications and wallpapers can be purchased and downloaded. Some with monthly usage fees. So a mobile operator driven store is nothing foreign to them and only natural to expand to more platforms and devices in their portfolio..

Impact to the Corporate Enterprise

It is clear with the success of the iPhone platform and it’s iTunes Store, that any major consumer contender will need to have similar features and ease of application access.

Solutions on how to bring this back to the enterprise still are in their infancy I believe. Many questions pop up and an area of “grey” and murkiness appears.  How does IT allow a corporate liable device access to the right application for their business? How can you streamline application activation, deployment and updates? I will try to address some of these questions in future blog postings!

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Windows Mobile 6.5 Upgrades – November 11, 2009

As I mentioned last month due to the public release of Windows Mobile 6.5, aka Windows Phone, I wanted to pick up where I left off with my previous popular postings on the public Windows Mobile 6.1 upgrades available for devices..

Many of these are not released yet, but due to the 6.5 marketing efforts some approximate release dates are being made public.  As they are released I will attempt to collect the links as I did previously with the Windows Mobile 6.1 upgrades. This time around Microsoft is also helping and providing their own official upgrade list here..

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Jailbroken iPhone worm on the loose down-under

I’m not surprised to see the news that one of the first worms has hit the jailbroken iPhone community. Granted it appears that this one does not do anything malicious, except for changing your wallpaper to an old 1980s picture of Rick Astley which the author apparently must have been a fan of. :-)

Please see more details here: http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/11/08/iphone-worm-discovered-wallpaper-rick-astley-photo/

This again brings up some important aspects when dealing with the iPhone and especially jailbroken iPhone’s in your business environment.  You probably want to filter and block any jailbroken iPhone devices from accessing your corporate data. Or at the very least make it a user policy that jailbroken devices are not acceptable. I believe at least one Device Management solution can detect a jailbroken iPhone, please see the information on MobileIron.

As Jonathan Zdziarski brings up repeatedly there are specific security gaps that you should be aware of when support the iPhone. To a certain extent custom applications can be coded to provide some protection of these gaps. See a good presentation of this here..

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Celio REDFLY now supports Blackberry

After many rumors, videos, announcements and a period of time, the Blackberry support is now publically available. It appears a firmware upgrade is necessary (which requires a Windows Mobile device) and only select Blackberry devices are supported here in beginning. But I think it is great that you can now leverage it across platforms! And can see on the forums that Windows Mobile 6.5 and Android support is not far behind!  Although I’m questioning why the original C8 owners are left sorta out in the dark..

“The REDFLY Mobile Companion is now compatible with select BlackBerry smartphones. REDFLY-supported phones at the time of launch are the Blackberry Bold 9000, BlackBerry Curve 8900, and the BlackBerry Tour 9630. Celio plans to support additional BlackBerry smartphones in the future as new phones are released.

The BlackBerry driver is offered free of charge to both existing and new REDFLY Mobile Companion model C8N and C7 owners.

If you have a REDFLY that was purchased before Nov 1, 2009 and you want to connect it to a supported BlackBerry smartphone, you will first need to update the REDFLY's firmware using a Windows Mobile phone in order for it to become "BlackBerry aware." Once the REDFLY firmware has been updated, it will connect to either a supported BlackBerry or a Windows Mobile phone interchangeably. REDFLY Mobile Companion units purchased after Nov 1, 2009 ship with the latest firmware and can connect directly to a BlackBerry without needing a firmware update.”

Go here for more information..

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Step-by-Step Introduction to Microsoft® My Phone

Together with the many announcements this week on the new Windows phone (aka Windows Mobile 6.5) there was also an announcement about the updated public release for the My Phone cloud service for Windows Mobile devices.

I will take a quick step-by-step view on the product and it’s features. I will attempt to use lots of screen shots so you have a good feeling on how the product works and operates. At the end I will state some observations from the corporate and consumer sides on the product.

History and Background

First a little history. Codenamed “SkyBox”, it was first publically announced way back on February 16, 2009 together with Marketplace (codenamed “SkyMarket) and Windows Mobile 6.5 at Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona Spain.

As described by Mary-Jo Foley on February 3, 2009, the current launch release does appear to be “SkyBox v1.5” she described way back then. So the vision and features she described behind “SkyBox v2.0” might indeed show the light of day with the next release of Windows phone (aka Windows Mobile 7.0).

Much of the technology behind My Phone is believed to be from the acquisition in June 2008 that Microsoft made of the Portuguese company called MobiComp. This can also be confirmed by viewing the location field in the product team’s blog. :-)

Also back in 2008, Microsoft Live Mesh, appeared to be the cross-platform synchronization solution that would take data from/to mobile devices. The direction with Microsoft My Phone today appears to make a distinct path away from Live Mesh, at least where the Windows Mobile devices are concerned..

What does it do?

Microsoft My Phone provides a free backup and restore mechanism for Windows phone/Mobile devices.

The default settings will synchronize your contacts, calendar appointments, tasks, photos, videos, text messages, songs, browser favorites and documents between your phone and your My Phone web account.

From the password-protected web site (Windows Live ID driven) you can organize contacts and appointments on your phone, and search through your old text messages. Changes appear on your phone the next time you sync.

Please go here for more details.

New Features

Since the first early limited beta access in February 2009 to the public beta in May 2009 much of the feature set remained the same. With the Windows phone launch announcement on October 6, 2009, several new features where announced (as quoted from the e-mail announcement):

Share photos on popular social networks

“With just a few clicks, you can post photos to Windows Live, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr from the My Phone online portal or directly from your phone.”

Find your missing phone

“My Phone can show you the last known location of your phone on a map.  To activate this feature, select "Send phone location" in your phone's My Phone settings.  Not available in all markets.”

Premium features

“My Phone can help you secure a lost phone using new Premium features.  You can lock or post a message on your phone from the web.  Or, if you know the phone is gone for good, you can use My Phone to erase all your personal information so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands.  For a limited time, you can try these features for free, so be sure to check them out.  Premium features are not available in all markets.”

Important to note from the launch announcement, that several features are currently available only in the United States at this time:

“The My Phone Premium package includes the ability to immediately locate the phone’s current location on a map (in the U.S. only)”

“Windows Mobile 6.0, 6.1 or 6.5 can access the premium package free of charge until Nov. 30, 2009. After that date, seven-day access to the premium package will be available for purchase for $4.99 in the U.S.”

Upgrade

The upgrade process from my previous version was fairly seamless and mandatory if I wished to continue the free service. A reboot of the device was necessary to complete the upgrade installation.

New Installation

If not already present on your device (from your OEM or Mobile Operator) a new application installation on a device can occur in several ways:

- Accessing http://myphone.microsoft.com directly on the device or desktop/notebook, can lead you to the Microsoft site where it can send you a text message with the download link.

- Accessing http://myphone.microsoft.com\install directly on the device, and download it directly onto the device.

- Accessing Windows Marketplace for Mobile and download the free application to your phone.

After the installation when you start up the application for the first time, you will see screens like these to setup and configure your device:

After you hit Finish, a manual synchronization process will take place with the selected data types.

Menu and About

The main menu options, and the version tested is 01.05.2128.0401.

If you hit the “Sync” option to the bottom left you will activate a manual synchronization.

Now some quick screen shots of each of the main menu options.

Sync Details

Show changes made and useful information such as total size and date/time of last synchronization.

Synchronization processes continue in the background (wonderful multitasking features Windows Mobile continues to have isn’t it?).

Sync Options

Please notice that if you have an ActiveSync configuration to an Exchange server or using Windows Live for e-mail the Contacts and Calendar options will not be available for selection.

Please notice the new “Current location” option that can be selected, compared to the previous My Phone release.

Sync Schedule

Share Photos

The new Share menu option lets you select a picture on the device and send it through the configured e-mail or Text messaging.

The Social Networks options supports 4 social services at this time:

The Flickr feature alone could make other 3rd party add-on applications obsolete depending on the features and be another value to using My Phone.

Account Options

Give you a basic fare of account options.

Microsoft My Phone Backend

But the real magic is now on the new backend. After you signing to your account using your Windows Live ID at http://microsoft.com/myphone and click on “Connected phones”, and out for the icon for your phone click on “Locate your phone”. This new screen appears:

Clicking the “Get started” link for the brings up a 2-step process to sign up for the new Premium Features:

After input of the phone number and a few brief seconds of magic (with no new text message announcements on the phone), it appears it was happy and announced i was confirmed:

Please note that the free trial of the Premium Features is available per device you are using with the free service. Going back to the previous page, I now see usage options for the new features. Take note of the limited number of free usages and the short 7 day trial period. Is there a reason why it couldn’t be a tad longer, like 14 days?

Locating your phone

Even in the free My Phone services, locating your phone can be performed. However this is using the last synchronization data, either automated or manual.

As part of the Premium Features you can poll the device location on-demand. It appears this is using text messages. Most likely OMA DM type messages.

Once you do have a GPS coordinate synchronized in My Phone with the back-end server(s) you will see a active link and last known location:

Location Issues

An ongoing problem with many devices today is the reliability of the public available GPS, especially in-doors where it was never designed to function. :-)  Many applications are now using hybrid solutions using Mobile Operator/Carrier tower triangulation, or the currently connected tower location. Battery consumption when having GPS enabled also continues to be a problem with the power usage and battery technology available in the devices on the market. Although that is starting to change with better A-GPS chipsets, LCD/LED screen and CPU designs.

It appears that My Phone is dependant on a good GPS signal at the time of the synchronization or the on-demand Premium functionality, so you may have some issues until that falls into place.

I would advise to seek help from the OEM or Mobile Operator where you received your device from if you have general GPS issues or questions.

Microsoft My Phone Limitations

The main basic limitation is the support for down-level Windows Mobile operating systems. So you will need Windows Mobile 6.0 or above to use the device application and cloud service.

For the free services, there is not much to point out limitation wise:

- There is a 200Mb limit of storage per account for all data of any kind (text, docs, pictures, storage card etc).

If you do select to backup the contents of the storage card, or have a large number of pictures, the 200Mb limit may be a bit tight understandably. There is also no flexibility at this time to specify certain folders or file filters.

I can only hope that Microsoft will work on increasing this 200Mb limit as the product matures. Think of Hotmail when it first started, and the high limits we have today. :-)

- As to the maximum number of devices you can “connect” to on your same My Phone account, I’m unsure.

I’m personally currently up to 5 different devices and no complaints. :-)

- Data transfer. No limitation from the application side, your Mobile Operator may think otherwise…

Since there currently is minimal flexibility of the selection of on-device content you wish to synchronize you should be aware of any data plan concerns on your device from the Mobile Operator/Carrier side.

May device/plans may have restrictions of the amount of data you can transfer monthly. And if you are roaming and/or travelling internationally you might to seriously consider to turn off automatic synchronization to save yourself from an enormous bill. 

Microsoft My Phone Paid Features

Apart from the free services currently being offered, the new paid Premium Features is the big news in this round.

Depending on the final pricing structure (USD $4.99/month?) the features currently available may appeal to certain consumers who don’t have corporate e-mail (like Exchange) and want to have similar remote-wipe capabilities. The phone location feature of course could appeal to any parent of children, family or small-sized companies. And the ring and lock features could pay for itself quite rapidly in my mind.

I would also hope that the paid services won’t have any of the advertisement banners that the freebie My Phone web site has after you sign-in.

Microsoft My Phone Paid Features – Ring your phone

I was impressed with this feature, since I validated it even if your ringer is off, once activated it will turn on the ringer!

On the device itself, a visual notification will also appear:

Microsoft My Phone Paid Features – Lock your phone

This Premium feature has some nice additional features to customize the activity with a PIN and custom message which will be used on the phone:

Please note that there is a 52 character limit.

On the phone itself this is what it looks like:

These are the screen shots if you enter in the wrong unlock PIN code:

For a deeper explanation of the custom “unlock screen” My Phone has now enforced on the device, please see Andreas Helland’s article here.

A confirmation on the Lock displays on your account screen:

Once the phone is unlocked with the right code, it appears a reboot was enforced on my test device. Possibly to undo the Unlock screen that was enforced..

Microsoft My Phone Paid Features – Erase your phone

This feature is pretty self explanatory, but one nice feature is that you can mandate a final My Phone synchronization before the remote wipe happens.

Once erased your device will also no longer show up in your “Connected phones” page on your My Phone login.

Enterprise Concerns & Solutions

The Microsoft My Phone service is very consumer oriented and driven towards features consumers would use and like. However many of these features could be very appealing for corporate users and IT administrators alike. 

With ActiveSync enabled on the device, the Contacts and Calendar options are not available for My Phone synchronization and assumed safely stored on the server side. Although the thought of corporate documents and text messages (or even links, if intranet access is available) placed on a 3rd party server with no corporate supervision or access will have most corporate security staff antsy and concerned. So the recommendation there is to have a Device Management solution in place and block the ability to run/install Microsoft My Phone on your corporate assets.

Even with the upcoming Exchange 2010 release and it’s promise of text messaging integration there are still some gaps at this point. Exchange does have the remote wipe feature through ActiveSync, and all the same limitations (device must be connected) apply to either solution (or any for that matter).

Other 3rd party Device Management solutions do have more of the backup features of Microsoft My Phone, of course for a price. However in a corporate setting this additional price could be justifiably due to security, legal and information loss concerns.  One slick new product in particular has many interesting device-backup features (off device AntiVirus and virtualization). Please check out MobileIron if you wish to know more. Sybase iAnywhere Afaria also supplies some enterprise solutions for mobile backup and file transfer.

Regarding location features on the enterprise side, many solutions are out there due to the LBS (Location Based Services) needed by the transportation industry. The Device Management solutions from MobileIron and SOTI MobiControl even have easy to use and powerful mapping features to visual see one or more of your manage devices from a corporate perspective.

The easy to use features of My Phone highlights the needs from the Enterprise side to have similar solutions in the corporate space.

Solutions that compare to My Phone

On the one off, consumer side, there are also some paid utilities with some of the same location and backup features My Phone offers as well.

Sprite Software’s Sprite Backup and Sprite Terminator come to mind. Sprite Terminator actually goes further and provides some additional very cool features. Such as, Remote Lock-Down, SIM Change Alert and Activity Retrieval. Sprite Backup has PC, FTP and SD card backup location features, but no Internet “cloud” storage like Microsoft My Phone..

Apple MobileMe

Of course the similarities to the Apple MobileMe service for the iPhone is there. It has a 60-day free trail and a USD $99/year cost. With that you 20Gb of storage, and a monthly 200Gb transfer limitation. Family Packs are USD $149/year with 4 additional e-mail address and 5Gb of storage each. Additional free for extra 40Gb of space.

The current Apple MobileMe features do appear slightly less flashy however. It covers mainly e-mail, contacts, calendar and pictures and the synchronization of them between the iPhone, Mac/PC and website(s).

Dashwire

The free Dashwire solution has been around since the CTIA conference in 2007 and offers some very mature synchronization features. But it is no longer accepting new users, and appears to shutdown at the end of the year. It provided a great web interface and synchronization of the various data content on your phone. But no location and remote wipe features. I was personally using this before Microsoft My Phone on my Windows Mobile devices.

As recently announce at the CTIA 2009 conference a branded Best Buy Mobile version of the Dashwire technology, now labeled Dashworks Platform was unveiled. It is called mIQ. Here is a promo screenshot:

It appears to provide a similar data content backup/restore functionality, and across several platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry and soon Android in Q1/2010). But again, no additional features such as remote wipe at this time..

Reference links

Home page:
http://myphone.microsoft.com
Product Team Blog:
http://myphoneteam.spaces.live.com
Forum:
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/MyPhone/threads
Twitter:
http://twitter.com/msmyphone

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Oct 11, 2009: Updated with Dashwire information.
Oct 12, 2009: Updated with My Phone map info, and Premium feature details.

Samsung and Enterprise Mobile

This week has the large CTIA Wireless IT show going on in San Diego this year, so of course there is a lot of new information coming out this week on products, services and partnerships. One of which is Samsung who is continuing to announce their commitment to support enterprise mobility in a big way. I believe they remain one of the few handset OEMs going to this extent to bring it all together on their devices and catering directly to the enterprise mobility market space..

• Samsung: Samsung Mobile Announces Comprehensive Commitment to Deliver Support, Innovation and Services to Enterprise Market
• Enterprise Mobile: Samsung Mobile Plans to Work with Enterprise Mobile to Deliver Advanced Mobility Solutions for Enterprise Customers
• Oracle: Samsung to Offer Mobile Access to Oracle, Other Software
• Sybase: Samsung Mobile and Sybase to Deliver Advanced Mobility Solutions for Enterprise Customers
• DiVitas: Samsung, DiVitas Partner to Bring Mobile UC to Windows Mobile Devices
• Agito: Samsung Mobile and Agito Networks Announce Availability of First Server-Based Mobile Unified Communications on Samsung Smart Phones

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Locking down SCMDM servers securely

Just a quick nod to J.C. Hornbeck and Clint Koenig at Microsoft on the great reminder to use the Security Configuration Wizard (SCW) for Windows 2003 templates available in the SCMDM 2008 SP1 Resource Kit – Server Tools download..

This way you can, if required in your production environment, minimize the attack surface of each server role. In particular this could be a good thing to do for the Gateway server sitting on your DMZ.  However, please be aware of any remote server management, backup, or other tools and services that might be required for your environment to function properly..

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