Aug 21, 2020
Managing Enterprise Mobile Applications Distribution
- MAM Solutions from Entgra
The trend of the corporate organizations of the day is to shift more towards a mobile-first workforce making it equally convenient for the employer and the employee.
With mobile applications proliferating and getting themselves embedded in our way of routine life, it only makes sense to use your personal devices for office use to be omnipresent — the current default state of being abreast in the corporate world. As such, it is of utmost importance that we maintain a clear distinction of personal versus corporate use of data in our mobile devices. It sure sounds easy, but the hassle and pain points often go unrewarded.
Remember the time you manually sorted the corporate apps on your mobile that needed not to be with you in the first place?
Or, that time when Dilbert takes his personal laptop to the office desperate to get some productive work done — and is greeted by his IT administrator giving a novel meaning to tech-savvy device management!
Life should be easier than that, at least for mobile devices and applications that run on them.
To Manage or Not — Your Apps, that is!
How would you, as an organization, envision the smooth management of your corporate mobile applications run on different devices with the complexity of various disparate operating systems, hardware/software and network requirements?
Gartner defines*¹ a Mobile Application Management (MAM) tool as an on-premises or SaaS (Software as a Service) tool specifically designed for the license management, distribution, securing and life cycle management of apps for mobile device platforms.
That is, MAM tools provide integration with public app store payment, licensing mechanisms, an enterprise app store, and the ability to set policies related to security, usage and ongoing management for apps or groups of apps.
In terms of simple use cases, this translates into everyday app managing problems of organizations having Work Profile enrollments for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), Fully Managed via COPE (Corporately Owned Personally Enabled), Dedidated in COSU (Corporately Owned Single Use) or Legacy type of enrollments for mobile devices of their employees. Alternatively, you can opt for Google Enterprise App Management for enrolling devices as Google Enterprise enabled work profiles.*²
For example, you might want your employees to access only the mobile applications made available to them via the organization’s app store and not via the Play Store or iTunes. Or, opt for disabling YouTube videos from being played on the device. Perhaps the Wi-Fi, VPN and the corporate apps should get pushed automatically while the policies, restrictions and control measures also must seep in along with.
You would most likely have your own organization corporate policies governing such restrictions in place. It is here that an efficient MAM would would play a vital role in ensuring the uniform, consistent enforcement of such corporate policies leaving no room for loopholes and human errors.
Managing Your Applications with Entgra:
Mobile applications are specifically created to run on mobile devices, and hence come with inherent integration issues, security vulnerabilities and life cycle management requirements as those of the different types of devices themselves. It is imperative that you manage all of the above with ease and convenience, given that you are dealing with 1000s of corporate devices daily, that run them.
Entgra IoT server comprises of the following broad areas of management:
EMM — Enterprise Mobility Management
MDM — Mobile Device Management
MAM — Mobile Application Management
With our MAM comprising of:
- Application life cycle management and securely deploying applications on user devices.
- Application store that provides the capabilities to install/uninstall or upgrade applications on user’s devices.
- Enabling the management of corporate apps as well as public apps from Google Play Store or Apple app store.
- App management including managing licenses, bulk license provisioning and scheduled app management.
- Managing the life cycle of mobile applications from the point of creating the application to installing it on a device.
- Ensuring certain applications become visible only to those with defined permissions.
- Managing mobile application versioning and updating mobile applications.
- Installing mobile applications on multiple devices simultaneously using enterprise subscriptions.
- Blocklist or Allowlist mobile applications.
Benefits of Mobile Application Management (MAM) Software:
- One-time setup.
- Management is completely remote and does not require possession of the device.
- Requires minimal admin intervention and zero user action.
With all of the above, over at Entgra, we offer you a wide variety of solutions for managing your applications at the convenience of your fingertips, literally.
Our Entgra IoT Server enables managing Android, iOS, and Windows mobile applications, and facilitates the following interfaces for Mobile App Creators/Publishers to manage their applications:
App Publisher: The portal for creating, publishing and managing applications. This is the developer view of the enterprise application store that comes with the product.
App Store : This is an in-house corporate app store where you can host all your corporate applications. Users may browse apps and install them to their devices if the administrator has made the apps publicly visible to users. Administrator can install, uninstall and update apps in the user device or device groups. It also comes with social features such as rating and liking that help Mobile App Creators to understand the popularity and usability of their mobile applications.
Google Enterprise EMM Partner for Android
Entgra has also been accredited as an enterprise EMM partner for Android, and recognized as one of the best Android Device and Service Providers by Google. This in short means that all public apps from Google Play Store can now be installed silently. Combining this with the app installation policy at enrollment, you can now define some private/public apps to be installed silently from Play Store when the user enrolls a device.
Some of the App Management Features available with Entgra are as per the screenshots below:
These, along with our MDM and EMM capabilities, extensively cover the scope of Enterprise Mobility Management services available today.
Based on the need for enterprises to manage their mobile and IoT devices, developed to industry standard REST APIs, our present platform has evolved through customer requirements and feedback to what it is today. Entgra is a fully-fledged vendor supporting all features for Android and iOS in the same platform, along with IoT capabilities.
Our comprehensive documentation and video tutorials will guide you through each of the following steps in managing your mobile applications:
- How to Publish an Application and Add Reviews — (video)
- How to Add a New Enterprise App Release and Manage the Life Cycle — (video)
- Google Enterprise App Management — (guide)
- How to Install/Uninstall Apps in BYOD Mode — (video)
- Managing Applications — (guide)
We at Engtra, are more than happy to help you wade through the multitude of your mobile application chaos, and make your life a little better — do reach out to us at contact@entgra.io.
Connect — Digitalize — Transform — with Entgra.
References:
- *1 — Gartner’s Peer Insights — Reviews for Mobile Application Management (MAM) Market
- *2 — Types of Device Enrollments available for Android, iOS & macOS and Windows at Entgra are detailed out here.
- *3 — Overview — WSO2 Enterprise Mobility Manager — the precursor to Entgra IoT Server.
