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My Pocket PC Thoughts Posts
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Recently while at the MVP Summit, I attended a session on Microsoft's new System Center Mobile Device Manager (SCMDM) product. This piece of software, when set up and running, allows IT administrators to lock down many of the functions in Windows Mobile as well as deploy applications similar to the way admins do it on the desktop. I downloaded a version of the software, and while my test environment caused me more headaches than joyous occassions, the product does look like it has substantial promise. But that's not the point of this piece - I'm more interested in the strategy of mobile device administration that it allows corporations to utilize, and concerned that it may tempt companies to adopt a rollout strategy that may not be appropriate for Windows Mobile.
If you're the IT Executive of a company and you wake up one morning thinking "I want all my users to be able to use a Windows Mobile device", you have two options. First, you could get budget approval for training, implementation, and deployment of company-purchased devices (perhaps eventually shifting the cost to the user, but most likely the company will spend a considerable chunk of change on the actual devices). This would also require your IT department to receive devices in bulk, and configure them in bulk (This is where many other company's managment suites come into play, as installed agents put on devices before users ever receive them from IT).
Of course you could go another route - the route popularized by RIM. In this route, your users learn about a great new device they can use to get their work e-mail and such at home, called a Blackberry. They go to their cell phone company see Blackberries displayed in the store. User buys device, user contacts their IT department and receives enrollment instructions. User plugs in enrollment values, device downloads settings from IT's servers, and device is configured.
Obviously the second model shifts much of the physical handling of the device to the end user, and this is the model SCMDM fits: Give the user an enrollment password and let them set it up. This model shifts the IT department from an active role in deployment to a passive one - a good thing as far as enterprise adoption is concerned, right? Well maybe not quite - because the model also depends on users taking the first step: namely knowing about and buying the device.
Since Windows Mobile 5, Microsoft has focused many resources (Some say too many) on enterprise functionality, with SCMDM being the latest offering. But if you want your device to be successful in the enterprise, is it a good idea to shift responsibility for buying the device to the user? Especially since Windows Mobile has yet to reach the name recognition of Blackberry. It just concerns me that while SCMDM is a great tool for enterprises, it may cause them to put the responsibility of buying a device on their users, which may in turn actually hurt Windows Mobile adoption in enterprise environments. This is really bad for Windows Mobile as a platform, as it prides itself on its budding enterprise support. But if users never buy the devices, they can't be used in the enterprise!
What do you think - is the model of "user buys device" going to help or hurt Windows Mobile, with special attention to enterprise adoption of the platform (and perhaps enterprise conversion from Blackberry to WM).
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My Pocket PC Thoughts Posts
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"The first "official" photos and specs for the HTC Diamond have been leaked, complete with a 2.8-inch 640 x 480 pixel screen (twice the lines of the iPhone in smaller surface,) Windows Mobile 6.1 and 3G connectivity. Could this be the most important product of the year HTC said it would reveal in London on Tuesday? The fabled iPhone Killer? Addy will be liveblogging the event, so we will discover it then. It certainly seems like a good cellphone, judging from the specs."
VGA, WM 6.1 Pro, Wifi, Bluetooth, 3.2 Megapixel camera, FM radio, 4 GB internal memory, and perhaps most importantly: GSM (Until now we'd only seen rumors of a CDMA version). Not a bad looking device either. Perhaps I've found my annual "Jon's Device To Lust Over All Summer", unless HTC announces something even nicer on Tuesday! Anyone else want one?
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"Oh, to be a fly on the wall in one of those meetings once in a while where product names get hammered out. Seriously, what possessed Movistar to latch on to "Touch Find" for this one? Was HTC's own name, Touch Cruise, not good enough for 'em? Or heck, how about the Xda Orbit 2 (pictured) moniker used by Movistar's own O2 subsidiary? Alas, yeah, the latest rumor here is that the Touch Cruise will be christened Touch Find for Movistar's networks, featuring 3.6Mbps HSDPA, WiFi, GPS, and a 3 megapixel cam. We don't know for certain whether the Touch Find will adopt the O2's same pebble-esque case or the Touch Cruise's harder lines, but it certainly seems like it'd make more sense to be consistent within the company ranks and go Xda Orbit 2-style" 
Ah, the good old days when I could keep track of HTC codenames, vendor names, and more without too much trouble or worry of brain damage. Movistar, unhappy with the idea people would cruise with their Touch Cruise apparently, changes the name to Touch Find. Cruise, find, whaever... Still a pretty attractive unit.
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"Mobile Admin is an enterprise network administration platform that allows unified management of all IT systems from any computer or handheld device. The Mobile Admin server software is installed on a single server on the network and allows for instant management of all other systems, without the need to install any agent software on the systems to be managed."
OK, as someone who travels and administers Windows server, I can really empathize with those that this software would help. Being able to manage Active Directory, Exchange, Domino, BES, Citrix, oracle, VMWare, and more from my handheld sounds like a godsend. However at the price of $495 per user, I have a hunch that only those with deep I.T. budgets will be able to afford this offering (And I totally understand this software is for a niche market, hence the higher price - but $495 is probably the highest price I've ever seen for a Windows Mobile application). It's a shame too, because if it was around $99 for a single user license, I most likely would have bought it already...
There is a trial available, and I'm sure some of our readers have the budget and need for this software. If you're one of them, let us know how it is!
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E-mail is a nasty little thing when you really think about it. It enables us to communicate information faster than any other media available today, is flexible enough to allow us to use it both professionally (e.g. sending documents for review) and privately (e.g. sending pictures of our kids and pets), and is reckless enough to give birth to the most heinous annoyance of the 21st century thus far: SPAM. E-mail, love it or hate it, is here to stay - which prompts me to question how we use it. Last summer we had an interesting discussion about E-mail organization strategies, which revealed that there seem to be two types of E-mailers, those with clean inboxes and those with multiple pieces of E-mail keeping the inbox nicely stocked. Today I'd like to address a different yet related question: How often do you check E-mail?
Checking E-mail used to be a quaint little thing back in the days of dial-up. You dialed in, hit "Send/Receive" and waited as E-mail goodness flowed in. Perhaps you did a bit of replying, archiving, or ignoring, hit "Send/Receive" one more time and logged off. Then broadband hit us, and many of us (I suspect) started keeping Outlook running, so that we could get email more or less as it came in (e.g. having it automatically send/receive every 5 minutes). Then Exchange Servers came around and we had Outlook in Connected mode, hearing a little ding every so often that called us over to it. Somewhere around this time, I think some of us became slaves to E-Mail: Hear the ding, check it out, go back to work until... DING... check E-mail, go back to work.... DING... etc...
About 2 years ago, I read an article by Henry Roediger, in which he suggested that academics try to avoid E-mail maddness by setting up various times throughout the day to check E-Mail, and leaving Outlook closed the rest of the time. I thought that was nuts: I've got a Windows Mobile device - why shouldn't I continuously check my mail all day? After all, I can stay on top of things and keep my inbox nice and clean. I didn't think much about his article until late last year when I thought "Gee, maybe I should try it"...
So I opened up Outlook and I de-selected any instant notification options for E-Mail. No Desktop alert, no ding, no change in the icon. Outlook could now run minimized and I had no idea how many E-Mails were flowing in. I also put my Pocket PC or Smartphone aside and refused to look at it (I even turned it over so I wouldn't glance at it out of the corner of my eye). Guess what happened? I had some of the most productive afternoons on record. Flying through lecture notes, papers to grade, forums to check, students to meet with, papers to revise, etc... Sometime around the end of the day I'd bring up Outlook and find, usually, that nothing important had been missed. I'd do some quick replying, a bit of filing, and close up and go home. It seemed that I'd gotten to a happy place E-mail wise. I made the Outlook notification changes on my other PCs and prepared for a life of productivity.
But it wasn't that simple. Some afternoons that I tried this, I did miss pretty important and urgent E-mails, which prompted people to call me, which was more of a distraction than E-mail had been in the first place. Other times I'd spend an afternoon working on a project that was delayed - a delay I didn't hear about until after the work was done because the organizers had E-mailed me about the delay. Still other times I'd miss personal E-mails which I would have liked to reply to quickly. It seemed that turning off notifications to E-mail wasn't a global godsend as much as a "works 50% of the time" measure. Now I could set up elaborate filters to let me know when certain E-mails come in while ignoring others, however that's pretty time consuming given the fact that the vast majority of my contacts have no idea that you can set E-mails to higher or lower importance, and the fact that I work with E-mail from a variety of sources (e.g. academics, students, computer technicians, geeks, journalists, software vendors, friends, etc...). Thus far a perfect solution has eluded me.
Are you a continuously connected E-Mailer? Do you know the second an E-mail comes in? Or do you take an approach similar to Roediger's, and have pre-set E-checking times? And what works best for you?
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