Remotely update SureLock configuration on mobile devices in the field
SureLock recently introduced the ability to export its settings to a file. This settings file could later be imported on any number of devices. What this means is an administrator can now configure and test his SureLock configuration on one device. Once he is satisfied with the device lockdown achieved and feels the configuration is ready for final field deployment, he can export this setting to a file and copy this settings file to his other devices and import it from within SureLock. Entire lockdown configuration gets cloned on new devices, within seconds.
Now we have taken SureLock Import/Export settings to another level by enabling Administrator to remotely change SureLock configuration on devices in field without requiring any user intervention.
SureLock can now be configured to periodically look for new configurations from a path. This path can be
- a local path on device. In this case, administrator can push new configuration files to the device remotely using some MDM solution (like SureMDM) and SureLock will pick up the new configuration from this file automatically.
- a remote http url. In this case, administrator can just upload the new settings to his web server and SureLock will download the new configuration directly from the website.
In both methods, there is no user intervention required from the end-user. All surelock devices, will detect the presence of a new configuration and apply it.
Following steps are required to configure SureLock to periodically look for new configurations:
- Goto SureLock Settings -> Import/Export Settings
- Under Automatic Import section, make sure "Enable Automatic Import" is checked.
- Tap on "Automatic Import File". Enter the full URL of the settings file on your server e.g. http://www.42gears.com/surelock/mysettings.settings. Alternatively, you can also specify a local file path e.g. /sdcard/surelock/mysettings.settings.
- Tap on "Periodic Check". Enter the periodicity in minutes, with which you want SureLock to poll for new settings.
- Thats it. SureLock is all set to automatically update itself from your server whenever you put new settings there.
In order to obtain the settings file from a Gold device follow the steps below:
- Goto SureLock settings -> Import/Export Settings
- Under "Export Settings" section, tap on Export to File. Enter the local file path where you want to save the settings (Note: this path should be a LOCAL file path.)
- SureLock should successfully export its current settings to this path.
We completely understand the Enterprise Mobility requirement where IT administrator can feel the need to modify the security lockdown configuration of the device whereby some rogue application needs to be blocked or some important application needs to allowed. Bringing back devices from field to do these modifications has huge costs involved, reduces mobile workforce productivity and most importantly, halts your business. This is why we feel, this new feature in SureLock will bring huge benefits to Enterprises and reinforces our commitment to make our customer's business more successful.
42Gears Mobility Systems is the leading vendor of mobility managament tools helping companies manage and secure their fleet of mobile devices such as Smartphones and Tablets. Learn more about our products.
Mobile Technology in Restaurant Business
Mobile Technology in Restaurant business
Use of tablets is on the rise everywhere. Even the restaurant industry is finding great potential in using tablets with an aim to increase revenues, increase customer loyalty and provide faster service and response times.
Restaurants have started to deploy tablets to take orders and entertain guests while they wait for the order to be delivered. They can play games or update their social status on Facebook or Twitter and let their friends know the food they are enjoying. And at the end of their meal, payments can be processed quickly with a credit-card reader attached to the tablet.
Advantages are enormous. It has been observed that people order more food if they can instantly order it without waiting for the server. Customers can view the full menu and tap on the food items that they want to order. No need to wait for the server to take your order. Order information is instantly transferred to the kitchen thereby reducing ordering time. Server’s job is to only deliver the food to the table.
Tablets also make it possible to deliver visuals (photographs and videos) of the food and beverages being served by the restaurant. The customers get a first-hand idea of what they are going to get. They probably can also see reviews of the items by the past customers.
Besides the imminent benefit to the guests, the restaurant can enjoy more benefits. Since the orders are digitally accepted, the order information from all customers is collected in a structured way and is stored into a database. This data can be used later for statistical purposes (say to accurately determine which food is in maximum demand on Friday evening). Technology enables Real time information collection and processing in real-time.
Use of mobile technology is surely going to benefit the $604 billion restaurant industry, helping both the customers and the restaurant businesses.
42Gears Mobility Systems is the leading vendor of mobility managament tools helping companies manage and secure their fleet of mobile devices such as Smartphones and Tablets. Learn more about our products.
HVAC Field Service Management Goes Mobile
Many of our customers are in the business of HVAC Field Service Management. Recent trend in this domain has been the increase in use of mobile technologies, including tablets and Smartphones bringing in efficiency and accuracy in the process.
HVAC stands for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning. Regular HVAC maintenance is essential to ensure that HVAC units do not break down and that they operate at maximum efficiency. Field technicians are assigned the service jobs by the main office which they execute at the customer’s premise (house, office etc).
A typical situation is like this. A service call is received from a customer. Staff at the main office dispatches the job to an appropriate field technician. The technician visits the site, performs his job and updates the jobs status as soon as it is completed. Staff sends the invoice to the customer and the transaction is completed.
Use of technology increases the efficiency of the field technicians and reduces manual errors that are introduced by paper-based process. Say a technician is using an Android tablet with a field service application. Office staff can easily dispatch the job to the technician over the air. Technician sees a job notification on his tablet. The job is picked. As soon as the job is finished, the technician updates the job status as "completed" on his tablet. The new job status is transferred to the back office in real-time where accounting system automatically generates an invoice for the customer.
There are enormous advantages for using mobile technologies in the area of field service management. Technicians quickly receive all the information they need including job history before they start their work. Field force can be easily tracked on the map using GPS which allows the office staff to efficiently allocate new tasks to the technicians out there.
Our products SureLock and SureFox provide an environment for secure and effective deployment of field management software on mobile devices including tablets and smartphones. To learn more about SureLock and SureFox, please visit http://www.42gears.com. Free trial versions are also available.
How to exit Single Application Mode in SureLock?
Single Application Mode is a powerful feature in SureLock (Android version). In this mode SureLock allows one and only one application to remain in the foreground all the time. Any attempt by the user to access any other application or functionality is blocked. Actually the user cannot even access anything other than the allowed application. Single Application Mode strictly locks down the Android tablet or Smartphone. Side-effect of this feature is that it does not leave an easy way for the administrator to quit SureLock or to modify its settings. But there is a solution.
Steps to quit SureLock Single Application Mode:
1. Power Off the device and turn it ON again.
2. After power up, SureLock will start automatically
3. If 'Single Application Mode' is set, SureLock will wait for 10 seconds before launching the allowed application.
4. Quickly tap on the back button 5 times
5. SureLock Password dialog is displayed. Enter the password to go to SureLock Settings screen. SureLock Settings screen has an option to quit.
To learn more about SureLock, please visit http://www.42gears.com/surelock/
SureLock: The Ultimate Lockdown for Androids
Android Smartphones and Tablets provide everything your business needs and more importantly, much more than you need-multimedia capabilities your employees would love to misuse. Practically it would be really difficult to keep an eye on every enterprise-owned device. The safest bet is to lock down your Android tablets and phones using SureLock. With plenty of security options for your devices, it lets you provide the perfectly secure access to the devices at any point of time. Regressively tested on the most commonly used Android devices such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab & HTC to name a few, SureLock provides a highly secure yet smooth UI to create the best lockdown for your device.
SureLock for Android Tablets and Smartphones
Prominent features of SureLock for Android are:
1. Runs only what is allowed, no trespassers allowed
2. Control access to WiFi, Bluetooth, Audio, Orientation settings and more
3. Single Application Mode- Ensures one application is running all the time, even after system reboot
4. Automatically launch applications at startup
5. Password protected access for administrators
Whatever be your device, wherever be your device, you can have complete peace of mind using SureLock. No more worries about device being used for unproductive purposes.
SureLock can be downloaded from Android Market or directly from the website. For trial and purchase related queries, visit us at www.42gears.com/surelock
Choosing a Mobile Device Management Vendor (Free whitepaper)
WhitePaper: Choosing a Mobile Device Management Vendor
You can download the whitepaper from Resources section. The whitepaper contains a checklist about how to choose a mobile device management vendor that addresses your current requirements and any potential future concerns as well.
How to know Android Applications Permissions
Android OS runs applications in separate sandboxes which means an application cannot directly access data or other resources belonging to another application. Rarely an application can do everything on its own. They usually need resources belonging to other applications installed on the system.
Android provides additional capabilities to applications by means of "Permissions". An application has to request for a permission before accessing data/resources shared by another application. For e.g. if an application wants to read contacts stored on the phone, the application developer must add android.permission.READ_CONTACTS permission to the manifest file of the application.
Before you download and install an application from the Android market, you can view all the permissions it is requesting for. One needs to be careful the kind of permissions that the applications ask for. Its a red flag if a puzzle game wants access to your location and also wants to read your contacts.
This problem becomes even more serious for companies. Your employees might be installing applications directly or through the Android market without any regard to what those applications could do. If you are an IT guy, you have the responsibility to make sure the corporate business data in protected from going out to unknown parties. But what can you do?
SureMDM has a cool feature that shows complete list of applications installed on the Android device, along with all the permissions that those apps are asking for.
Steps:
1. Login into the SureMDM Web Console,
2. Select your smartphone or tablet from the device list.
3. Click on the Apps buttons to see list of installed apps on the device.
4. Select an Application and Click on Permission button. Screen similar to the following will popup.
Angry Birds Permissions
Above snapshot shows what permissions are required by Angry Birds when it runs on your Android smartphone or tablet.
Conclusion
As a user we need to be careful about what the third-party applications might be doing on our phones. This becomes even more important for the enterprises in order to protect and safeguard the business information.
42Gears Mobility Systems is a leading vendor of mobile device management and security products. To know more about our game-changing approach to mobile device management visit http://www.42gears.com.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
“Bring your own device” (BYOD) is a new trend whereby companies allow their employees to bring their mobile devices (Smartphones or tablets) to work and allow them to be used for business purposes with access to company network and data. It’s a part of consumerization-of-IT wave that has started to gain serious traction in last two years. A recent survey has all the numbers.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/bring-your-own-device-becoming-accepted-business-practice-survey/63811
BYOD benefits:
1. Employees are more comfortable in using the devices of their choice. They don’t have to use two devices anymore, one for personal and one for business work.
2. With BYOD program in place, companies can avoid making investments for purchasing the devices. E.g. a company with 100 employees will usually spend $400 per Smartphone or tablet with a total cost of $40K. All that cost is now saved and so is the overhead and additional cost of commissioning, asset tracking and maintenance of the devices.
BYOD challenges:
1. With BYOD, Employees are going to store personal and business data on a single device. It is a challenge to ensure that the business data is protected.
2. Companies need to make sure that the devices are secure i.e. password policies are applied and data encryption is enabled. Normally users are not careful with their personal devices but companies cannot afford risking loss of business data in case the phone is lost or stolen
3. People tend to change gadgets as soon as something new and fancy is available. Employees will be upgrading to newer devices faster than ever. IT department has to make sure they keep themselves updated with new technology trends to ensure compliance goals are continually met. IT needs to move faster than the employees. Good Luck!
Above challenges can be alleviated to a large extent by using mobile device management tools (MDM). Overall cost for deploying these solutions is much lower than the cost of the devices.
Where BYOD won’t work?
BYOD model does not work in all cases. Some businesses want to super-secure the devices and restrict employees to use only certain applications or want the worker to access only a particular website on the device and nothing else. Of course the employee would want to have the freedom to play Angry Birds or browse news website once in a while on her “own” device. In such cases it’s better to provide a company owned devices to the employees.
Conclusion
BYOD is a new trend that has gained deep inroads into the financial services sector and looks promising to hit other domains as well. It could be beneficial to both employees and the employer. A well thought IT strategy around policy-based deployment, security, and management of “personal” devices is a pre-requisite for rolling out the BYOD program.
Lets us know what you think about BYOD. Will it work?
42Gears Mobility Systems is a leading vendor of mobile device management and security products. To know more about our game-changing approach to mobile device management visit http://www.42gears.com.
Kiosk mode on Android
SureLock for Android has been released. Trial version is available for download from our website as well as from the Android market.
Lock down android device into kiosk mode
Features:
* Lock down smartphones and tablets into kiosk mode
* Restrict users to allowed applications only
* Block users from accessing Home screen
* Block user from playing games, browsing or installing unapproved applications
* Block user from changing System Settings
* Admin can securely unlock the device with a password
Check out more details on our website at http://www.42gears.com/surelock/
Block users from running unallowed applications on Samsung Galaxy Tab 10
So your company has decided to give away tablets like Samsung Galaxy Tab to the employees for use for business purposes only. Well... you may be in for a surprise. As soon as they lay their hands on the tablets, the users are going to head straight to Android Market and start downloading cool free games and other applications. Soon the device will be full of useless applications resulting in performance degradation. Moreover if the tablet has a data plan, downloading such applications can cost you lots of money for data charges.
Android Tablets -> Unproductive Employees -> Unhappy Boss
SureMDM provides a very useful feature whereby you can remotely lockdown the android tablet (as well as android smartphones). Locking down means you can individually lock the installed applications and also disable the user from installing new applications. Whenever a user tries to launch a locked application, the user will be asked to enter a PIN (as configured by the administrator). No PIN is asked for if the application is not locked.
Android Tablets -> Locked by MDM -> Productive Employees -> Happy Boss
Use SureMDM to keep your employees productive which will surely make your boss happy. 