9 Enterprise Mobility Management Tools For IT Pros

Choosing the right EMM suite requires IT organizations to understand their needs and the capabilities of the various options. These nine options were featured in Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management Suites. They serve as a starting point to help you find the right tools for your IT needs.

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Metal In Motion

As a standalone, publicly traded EMM company, MobileIron has to contend with competitors that are part of larger technology firms like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, and VMware. With its stock down from about $10 per share in early 2015 to below $4 per share recently, it's easy to imagine the firm being acquired by Oracle or another deep-pocketed tech giant, such as AT&T or Verizon. It would probably be a strategically useful acquisition given Gartner's evident regard for the firm. MobileIron ranks well in Gartner's EMM Magic Quadrant, and has seen its earnings improve recently.

(Image: MobileIron)

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TreyMaryfield,
User Rank: Apprentice
9/20/2016 | 5:11:46 PM

Considerations before choosing an MDM

For all of you out there looking at MDM Solutions here are a few suggestions from someone who's been there done that.

1) As he wrote do your due diligence. Once you are on an MDM you will have to disenroll and then re-enroll all of your devices that you are moving to the new MDM. To do that you have to wipe and restore all of the devices you want to move to the new MDM after you have removed them from the original MDM and set it up in the new MDM.

2) MDM's are not the be-all-end-all. There are limitations to what you can manage from the Management portals. Example: If you have company owned devices that are locked down you have to be careful when pushing out iOS updates as I have seen them turn off location services. When the updates turns off Location Services the only way to turn it back on is by going in under the Restriction settings(using the restriction passcode which should be different than the lock code) and turn turn it back on. This cannot be changed from the Management console.

3) All MDM Providers have access to the same Apple API's for managing their devices. Which and how they are implemeted can and does vary widely between vendors.

4) While Apple allows vendors to push information to the devices via XML files, not all vendors suport this even when the application does.

Those are just a few of the things I've found since we started managing our iOS devices. For the most part I do like that I can do some of what I do using the Management console, but like every Manger I know that manages anything I want more control over my iDevices. Apple is making improvements to their API's and I have seen some good things come out over the last year so don't lose hope if you don't see something you want. Keep talking to your MDM, Apple, Android, Windows, etc. reps about what you need to make their devices more enterprise friendly using MDM.

Hope this helps.

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