Marco Nielsen at myITforum.com

Apple iPad – Possible Support Questions & Tips for Day 1

If you are supporting a corporate enterprise every day may bring new devices from employees that you may be asked to support.  Even if you have a strict supported device list that you hold regular end-users to, are you really going to say no way to your boss or one of the CxOs? :-)

Using a new iPad this weekend I have run into some minor quirks so far, but nothing major I believe. Sharing my experiences here so you may save some research time:

- Biggest confusion factor was that it appears it won’t charge on a regular USB connection, and needs the full 10W charge from a wall adaptor. Otherwise you may see the “Not Charging” text next to the battery icon in the top right corner.

- You need to download the latest iTunes 9.1 (or higher) version to setup and register the iPad for the first time. Still no way over the air.

- Some applications on the Apple iTunes AppStore are “universal” and can run on either on the iPhone/iPod Touch or iPad. Others may have separate versions with different names. If you sync Apps from your Apple account from previous devices, you may find yourself with several “duplicate” applications showing up and should delete the non-iPad versions.

- Older “legacy” iPhone/iPod Touch applications can be zoomed up to full screen by tapping the round “2x” icon in the bottom right when running.

- The iBooks app is free (as is the Amazon Kindle app for iPad), but the three iWork apps are USD $9.99 each at this time. Pages is a word processor, Numbers a spreadsheet app, and Keynote a presentation app. All native apps sold by Apple and only for the iPad at this time. Together they are probably one of the best competitors to most of the upcoming Windows 7 Phone Office Hub functionality.

- You can place up to 6 icons in the bottom line of the screen for easy access. This is compared to the usual 4 on the other platforms.

It will be interesting to see the future Android and Microsoft based tablets and how they will compete against the iPad..

Useful Links

Apple iPad Enterprise Support Forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=269 
For a good listing of iPad supported apps:
http://appshopper.com/ipad
The iPhone Config Utility has been updated to v2.2 last week to support the iPad:
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL926
http://images.apple.com/ipad/business/pdf/iPad_Deployment_Scenarios.pdf
But I don’t see any updates to the “Enterprise Deployment Guide” yet:
http://www.apple.com/support/ipad/enterprise/

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Mobile Device Management console from your Apple iPad

If you are one of the many that today now are also looking at now to manage your new Apple iPads, several vendors have iPhone mobile device management solutions. I suspect many will also soon have iPad support in a similar fashion. All are fairly limited by their functionality due to the Apple SDK and application “sandboxing” at this point. One such solution is available from Mobile Iron. In addition to regular device management features, they are shipping an ActiveSync “gateway” product called Sentry that ties in with the device management solution. This acts as a filtering mechanism to block unauthorized devices, such as iPhone, iPod Touch  and iPad’s trying to authenticate and sync their email accounts through a corporate ActiveSync login.

Yesterday Mobile Iron has released a new iPad application, called Mobile Iron Sentry for iPad, where you can view the Sentry activity, and also take action if you are authorized. This application is unique and first of it’s kind that I know of. It is available from the Apple iTunes AppStore here. Of course you can perform similar actions from it’s web console, but the native application is much more rich in functionality and ease of use..

Here are a few screen shots using the built in demo mode so you can see some data:

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