Last summer, I shared some thoughts on the limitations of mobile device management (MDM) solutions for managing deployments of iPad in commercial settings — specifically in places like restaurants, hotels, and retail stores. Since then, we’ve been working on some really interesting client work that revolves around iPads in these use cases.

We’ve learned a lot in the last 9 months. Since iPads are truly “consumer electronics” — i.e., personal devices built for the individual consumer and not commercial shared-use environments — deploying and managing thousands of them in these types of environments creates significant technical and operational challenges. While commercial MDM solutions address some of these challenges, they fall short of tackling some key issues:

User experience challenges and branding issues:

• Most of our customers want to maintain the native iPad user-experience — including access to a variety of third-party apps — while at the same time provide a curated experience and addressing security concerns.
• Public-use iPads are susceptible to personalization by users, and worse, vandalism. Users can change the customized appearance of the iPads, leave inappropriate content, or disrupt network connectivity. Just imagine the branding and marketing issues in a case where a hotel lobby full of public use iPads have been customized by users who change the Springboard wallpaper and move all the icons into a folder.

Technical and device management challenges:

• As the number of iPads that require management increases, day-to-day administration of iPads becomes really difficult to scale. Restores and refreshes of the devices become cumbersome, if not impossible.
• Scenarios in which administrators must roam the floor with laptops to support the iPads are undesirable and don’t scale well.

Some possible solutions

For one client, Control Group leveraged our extensive experience with both iOS and enterprise systems to tackle the infrastructure, implementation, design, and management of the commercial iPad deployment:

User experience:

• We built a restaurant menu that includes a custom web browser enabling users to browse the open web — including Gmail and Facebook — but it clears personal session information when the application quits.
• We enabled restrictions beyond standard MDM to protect the iPads from inappropriate content and use, by:
• Preventing access to the iOS device settings
• Restricting users from moving icons and creating folders
• Enabling a screensaver that activates when the iPads are idle

Technical and device management:

• No jailbreaking required. Our custom iOS configurations expand on Apple’s built-in restrictions.
• With our iPad management architecture, all iPads are connected to host computers seamlessly built into the restaurant furniture.
• We custom-built a USB peripheral that powers 16 iPads per host. This overcomes the electrical limitation of powering multiple iPads from a single computer.
• We enabled remote switch of any port to a data connection so that any iPad can be restored or refreshed remotely by the host computer.

We’ve given our clients a platform and a set of tools that provide a secure and curated user-experience for their customers, while at the same time, enabling them to scale their iPad deployments to thousands of devices across multiple locations. We think there are potential applications of these tools in the retail, healthcare, point of sale, and hospitality spaces.

If you’d like to learn more about our approach to iPad management, email me!

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Two years ago BlackBerries dominated at Control Group. Back then, if you picked up one of the orange Nerf balls that dotted the CG office landscape and threw it, chances were that you would hit someone who kept a BlackBerry Curve in their pocket. I have fond memories of the original Curve with its beautiful screen and extremely tactile keyboard, as it was the last BlackBerry I ever carried.

As an early adopter, I made the jump from the Curve to the first Android device, the G1. This began a change in the office where everyone was looking for a way to get away from the BlackBerry and get on to something else, be it an Android, iPhone, or Windows Mobile. Within a year, iPhones and Androids were quickly becoming the norm.  It got to a point where we had a New Year’s prediction that CG would be a BlackBerry free company by 2012– and it was almost correct. How close did we get?

From a company that was at a time 100% BlackBerry, we now have the following:



So what changed that caused such a radical shift? In short, the mobile landscape did, and what didn’t change was the Blackberry.

With a new emphasis on touchscreen devices that did more than just act as an email life vest, BlackBerry held fast to what made them the king. While they still focused on enterprise level email with Exchange servers, Apple and Google were providing media rich devices with more screen real estate and features than any BlackBerry had ever offered. As its competitors updated and perfected their devices, they took aim at the mighty BB… the iPhone with stronger Exchange functionality, and Android with it’s unique ability to sync seamlessly with Google Apps, as well as increased Exchange functionality.

A series of rushed products like the BB Storm and the BB App World just further showed that RIM didn’t get it. With a new line of hybrid touch devices still featuring the iconic keyboard, they’re still left with an OS that is tricky to code for at best, and has such a small market share that many developers don’t even bother writing apps for it.

RIM’s ace in the hole though, is the wildly successful BB Messenger. While it’s not enough to reel back the customers they have lost, it’s their bargaining chip with other mobile companies. Recent news suggests that RIM is being shopped around to their competitors, more specifically to Samsung. Fearing it is not long for this mobile world, they are trying to keep alive by licensing their software or by being bought out, either completely or by selling divisions.

It feels a bit premature to start writing a eulogy for the BlackBerry but it’s about that time to start notifying the family that this is likely Gramma BB’s last Thanksgiving. Even as a faithful Android user, I still reminisce about the old BlackBerry days when fast email and a good keyboard was all I needed. You could go 3 days without putting your BlackBerry on a charger, you didn’t have to worry about how much built in storage it had, and you didn’t have to worry about apps or games… it was a simpler device for a simpler time.

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In response to an internal thread on this article…

I’m right there with folks crying foul when Apple does wrong, but I don’t buy this one. Apple’s “bastardization” of the ePub format helps push the format forward, just like Opera and Mozilla’s modifications to HTML yielded HTML 5, Microsoft’s modifications led to OpenXML and practically everybody’s Wi-Fi implementations led to 802.11n. I’m not saying it’s on as grand a scope as that, but I do think it’s a small part of that same sort of momentum. All Apple did was add some extra CSS tricks that weren’t present in the ePub standard and then tweaked the MIME type so the files identify themselves as being slightly different than standard ePub files. If nobody built on top of open standards like this, then nobody would use open standards because they would develop uselessly slowly.

And while e-ink displays are indeed better for reading than LCD’s, I take issue with the headaches-because-of-refresh claim. There is no refresh on LCD’s, just per-pixel changes when the image changes. Tablet LCD’s are the same as your desktop display, which folks read on all day long without issue.

I still prefer a tree-killing paper book to both, though!

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A few weeks ago I was in the Anthropologie store in SoHo looking for specific dress.  They didn’t have it in my color/size so I asked the salesperson if she could see if another store had it in stock.  She said that they could order it and ship it to me for free right from the store and save me the trip.  Sweet!

Then she directed me to wait in a very long, holiday-time-in-New York City-sized line.

Twenty minutes later I finally reached the cash wrap.  To my surprise, the cashier pulled out an iPhone from her pocket, scanned the barcode of the sample dress with it, scrolled to the right size and color I was looking for, swiped my credit card with an attachment on the phone, and I was on my merry way.  Sweet?

Not so much. Why even bother with the iPhone and all of its wonderful functionality if I still had to wait in line for 20 minutes?  Isn’t the whole point of a mobile device its mobility? I couldn’t believe how much of my time they wasted when they just didn’t have to.

It’s like someone at Anthropologie said, “Hey, iPhones are cool!  Let’s get them so we can order stuff for customers direct from the store so they don’t leave without paying for something.  The end.”  There seemed to be no consideration of the iPhone’s real value to the customer experience.  To me, they could have used a catalogue and rotary phone and it would not have made a difference in my experience.  The cashier had the power in her hands!  Unfortunately, the salesperson on the floor was the one who should have had it. (Or hell, I could have had it!)

We see this all the time these days.  Companies buying the hot, new technology and using it in the same cold, stale way they’ve always done things.  In this case, it’s not only a waste of money, it’s damaging to the customer experience.  As companies start implementing technology that’s familiar to consumers, missteps like this become more obvious and frustrating and could actually damage the brand.

Put it this way, if there was no iPhone and they had to use an inventory management system I knew nothing about, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post. But I have an iPhone and I know why it’s awesome– instant gratification.  And so here I am venting about Anthropologie making me wait in line for 20 minutes despite having an instant gratification device right there in her heather grey, merino wool pocket.

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I’m really excited about several new iOS development and deployment projects that we’ve been working on at CG. We’re working closely with Apple on a bunch of solutions: at the most basic level, we’re building solutions for security and management of employee iPad and iPhone use; at the other end of the spectrum, we’re helping to realize visions such as a kiosk-like platform of thousands of iPads deployed in retail environments around the country.

We’ve learned a ton about what is and isn’t possible as we strategize ways to scale to thousands of units. Here are some of the challenges we’ve come across:

• How do we deploy and support iPads – whether ten or ten thousand – in a secure, efficient, and centralized way?
• How can we architect kiosk-like application experiences on the iPad, enabling us to design and curate the customer experience, while also allowing a true iPad experience complete with app-switching, web browsing, Facebook-checking, game-playing, and movie-watching?
• What kind of network and server architecture is needed to support a platform of iOS devices across the globe? How do we enable caching and pushing of dynamic data to the devices – particularly large amounts of media content?

Centralized deployment and support of iOS devices

How do we deploy and support thousands of iPads or iPhones in a secure, efficient, and centralized way? Mobile Device Management (MDM) platforms like AirWatch, Casper, MobileIron – and soon, OS X Lion Server – allow us to push XML configuration profiles to iOS devices. This enables centralized inventory and basic management of the devices: from what version of iOS they have installed, to some security control over how/if users can install and delete apps. For many enterprise customers, these tools are useful for administering security policies on employee-owned iOS devices. But for custom platforms like kiosks and retail experiences, MDM is not ideal due to the need for end-user interaction. What we need is a way to easily restore iOS devices back to their “golden” state in a centrally managed way.

We’re excited about the potential of over-the-air restores and software updates coming in iOS 5, but as of today, iTunes is the only game in town for this. Working within this limitation, we’ve architected some innovative solutions that enable iOS devices to connect to iTunes virtually over USB to IP converters and a content distribution infrastructure. Until iOS 5, this is a good option to have, and I haven’t heard of anyone else embracing this approach.

Rearchitecting Apple’s iOS user experience

Put an iPad in front of someone and they’re going to tap, scroll, pinch, and squeeze the user interface. The user experience is still the leader in the tablet space – though we’ve been recently impressed by the BlackBerry PlayBook. For a project we’re working on now, we want to encourage this user experimentation and interaction, while locking down some important components of the UX. Things like App Store purchases, iTunes downloads, deleting apps, rearranging icons, and changing the home screen wallpaper will quickly affect the kiosk experience. MDM solutions can help disable some of these features, but the aforementioned need for user interaction just doesn’t work for specialized user environments.

One solution we’ve had success with is a combination of custom code to disable user customization of the Springboard, plus a WebKit-based Safari replacement for browsing that enables us to prevent user download of unauthorized content. Combine these with some configuration profile-based customization of iOS and we have a good solution for locking a customer experience down and reducing the frequency of unit restores or reimaging.

The CG approach to iOS projects

Part of what makes CG stand out as a solution provider is our deeply embedded collaboration between our application development team and our infrastructure team. As the Enterprise’s appetite for customized mobile platforms and experiences grows, we’re uniquely suited as a technology partner to build and innovate on our customers’ vision. iOS is at the core of this vision and I couldn’t be more excited to be working with these technologies today. Plus, iOS 5 is on its way and it’s shaping up to be a giant leap forward!

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