The most cutting-edge enterprise mobility projects I’ve encountered involve custom-built mobile apps… not off-the-shelf packaged apps! In this case, try deploying/maintaining this type of project without mDM As enterprise mobility projects pick up momentum in this direction, mDM solutions will surely evolve & gain in maturity. To share an example, how can you effeciently [...]

I am totally aligned with you on this one Strong backends are necessary to guarantee the stability, flow and integration of data which completely justifies packaged & customized solutions. On the other hand, front-ends should be built to stick to business processes as you point out in your last paragraph and custom-built “apps” often [...]

It’s a shame there isn’t a “like” button on the articles… ^^ I feel that the mobile revolution in enterprise IT is pushing towards a strong distinction between front-ends and back-ends. Leave the back-ends in the back! Build custom user-centric apps around business processes or workflows, that’s what the mobile revolution is all about. And [...]

I agree: great article, totally in line with you. I’d go one step further and say that one of the problems here is that some companies are deploying “off-the-shelf customized” apps the way they built their back-ends 10 years ago… I say: leave the back-end in the back where it’s supposed to be and build [...]

I agree with all of the above Although it’s always interesting to see what type of mobility strategy a given company is rolling out (and how), it is most likely irrelevant to the next company that has a different business & general strategy… To sum up Philippe’s article, I’d say that since other companies [...]

I love the idea of COPE. To me, from the start, BYOD has always been a sort of point solution… Something you’d use waiting for a better solution. Even with a well developped BYOD program, there are some inherent problems that COPE solves: 1/ If the smartphone breaks while being used in a professionnal context, [...]

My gut feeling is that, whether the device is yours or your companies, if you *can* do things then there’s no reason for your company to blame you for doing it… Either they trust you and accept that you may do these things, or they don’t and should make sure you can’t do them.

Another advantage of physical stores is that you can pick-up the purchased items immediately… )

Making it hard to track down prices from other sources is just delaying the problem… Surprised Target is going down that track!

Totally agree with you Philippe! Do you think we can expect to see Apple open up its iBooks 2.0 to other mobile platforms? It would be an interesting move… They’d still be seen as the innovator, they’d control the e-commerce side of things (and retain possibly a larger share when distributing to Kindle) and [...]

Your insights are very interesting, thanks for this! Many people are aware of the “data security” point, but I feel that accepting that our mobile devices can be a distraction is often taboo…

I like the idea Philippe! We’ve gotten used to having a SIM card in our tablets, but is it really necessary… Most smartphones have tethering capabilities for data, so why not do the same with voice/video calls? When the tablet is on and connected to my smartphone, forward all calls to this device. Whether or [...]

Good point! Most mobile apps that have been around for a while and gone through various hardware and software upgrades are blue collared apps… which were always designed for a specific Symbol model, with a specific version of windows mobile – even then, despite mono-hardware and mono-OS, upgrades were tough! I’m guessing that if HTML5 [...]

Very interesting post, thanks! When companies buy Blackberry fleets, they’re usually doing it for the “desktop” functions of the smartphone: email, contacts, calendar… Of course the handsets are nice, but what companies like is the reliability! These basic functions work better than on any other phone! So why not consider it this way: RIM should [...]

Heh heh… I think Apple shares that vision as well!

Do we really have to choose between the two? What if these two form factors simply merged into one? As the operating systems of tablets and desktop/laptop computers slowly merge (iOS/Mac OS Lion and Windows8), and CPU of tablets keeps increasing, why couldn’t we all just have some kind of tablet that we’d carry around? [...]

This is a very interesting subject and I agree with most of what has been said above: IL devices so long as corporate Apps/data can be wiped by IT through MDM (or EMM…) is all very good… from an IT perspective! Where I disagree is that you imply that users would all go for IL [...]