Setting up SmartPhones for business use
Choosing a device
One of my recent projects at work has been to introduce a pilot scheme for smartphone use for college staff who need to stay 'connected' all the time. We've played around with PDAs before, and the college has some conventional mobile phones it can loan to staff going off-site, but we felt that we could do something else a bit more interesting.
After some thought, we selected the HTC Hermes / TyTN as our target platform for this pilot for a number of reasons:
- We had decided that 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, the ability to view and edit Office documents and a hardware keyboard were all requirements in our device.
- The Project's technical lead (Hi there!
) already owns one of these personally and is familiar with the hardware and default software.
- The PDAs we had already experimented with were Windows Mobile devices, and people liked these in general.
- They are easily available through T-Mobile's Web'n'Walk business plan.
- We use Exchange. Exchange can do push e-mail to Windows Mobile phones and push device policies to a phone at no extra cost.
- They can be upgraded to Windows Mobile 6, extending the "shelf life" of the phones.
Policies
I mentioned them quickly above, but they deserve further explanation. Policies with WM devices are a way of ensuring that all devices that sync to an Exchange server protect the information they download from the Exchange server to a 'corporate' standard. An admin can force each device to require a PIN when switched on, set timeout periods of inactivity before asking people to re-enter the pin, and so on. Most importantly of all, the admin can set a device to be wiped if it falls into the hands of a thief who tries to guess the user's device PIN.
Microsoft's exchange blog has a great list of policies for Exchange 2007 that show what they're thinking about here, and there are third party tools out there which add their own wrinkles. I'm not going to tell you what your policies ought to be, and you need to think about things like users who want to connect their own personal devices here as well as configuration for devices owned by the company, but I am going to say you need to make a decision about this at the start of a rollout.
Hardware and Software
With the platform decided on, our next questions were supporting hardware and software.
We purchased one of the TyTNs from T-Mobile in a bundle with a CoPilot GPS device and software. I've got to confess with being a little disappointed with the CoPilot GPS hardware; either someone at CoPilot pulled their documentation on setting this device up out of their ass or it's only designed to work with CoPilot's own software. I much prefer my own Bluetooth GPS which was a fairly cheap purchase at SVP - my GPS might not look fancy but it works with TomTom (and buying TomTom software plus this costs less than the CoPilot bundle!) and it works very well indeed with Microsoft's Mobile Live Search (free download).
We also decided to order USB cradles for all our phones, and this shows the one bad note we've found with T-Mobile so far. I tried to order these cradles from T-Mobile themselves but we were told in no uncertain terms that T-Mobile would only speak to our 'account holder' - and wouldn't even say who they thought that was. I assumed this was my boss (who was out of the office that week) but it turned out to be the college's principal in the end.
Anyway, long story short, we ended up ordering the cradles from another supplier because I really couldn't be bothered to argue with T-Mobile over this; I wouldn't mind if we were ringing up about some aspect of the bill or the calling plan, but making business customers jump through hoops like this to order a few cradles... well.
With the hardware in place, our thoughts turned to software, and we decided on a standard 'build image' of the phone software for all our phones in order to make configuring and supporting these phones easy for us and hence less painful for the users, who can still customise 'their' phones how they please, but at least they'll all be starting from the same place.
To facilitate building this image, our first purchase was SPB Software's Backup software. I've mentioned this before as a fantastic backup tool and we selected this item for three reasons which I'll outline below.
- You get a 20% discount from SPB on all software after your first purchase, which is helpful when you consider we want this software on all our phones and need one licence per phone. Hey, we're a college and it's your (UK readers only) tax money we're trying to save here!
- It allows you to run a scheduled backup as a background task, without the user having to see it happening, and it allows you to protect this backup with a password. In the event of a user off-site managing to mess their phone up, it should be possible to walk them through restoring the phone to the condition it was in at the time of the last backup, which we've scheduled as a nightly process.
- You can make a backup on one phone and restore it on as many other identical phones as you like. Yep, this gives us our "Windows Mobile Ghost" ability to set-up our hardware settings and install software how we want on one phone and distribute this configuration easily and reliably to all our users.
Our next purchase takes us back to SPB software for a couple of licences of GPRS Monitor. We're only using this on a couple of phones in our trial in order to get some figures for 'typical' data use during our trial period, but we feel the information about usage patterns, volume of data and so-on will prove invaluable when deciding on if and how to expand our pilot scheme in the future. We also have one copy of SPB's Mobile Shell, which we're playing with at the moment to decide if it's worth looking at any further.
The rest of the software loaded onto our phones is all freeware of one sort or another.
First up, a little home-brew. Our Exchange server's SSL certificates are issued by a root certificate provider who is well known enough to get into IE and Firefox and Safari with no trouble but who appear not to be in the certificate list for mobile devices... but they offer free certs to educational establishments so it's worth the pain. Anyway, Using the procedure outlined here I created a couple of .cab files to deploy the root and intermediate certificates for this CA so that we can protect our email data to the phones with SSL.
Next up is MortRing. This is a fun piece of software that you might imagine using on a personal device to have a bit of fun assigning different ringtones to SMS messages from different contacts, and it does a fine job of this too I have to say. For our business though, it performs another slightly more serious function, that of replacing pagers for key staff.
At the moment we have very simple pagers - you get sent a page and all it tells you is the extension number you have to ring to find out why you're being paged. Now this actually isn't a problem most of the time, but for first aiders and other people who deal with any other urgent incidents this can represent a big delay in finding out where and why you're being paged. Using MortRing configured to trigger different SMS alert tones based on keywords in a message, we can have our smart phones use one type of alert tone for normal messages, another different tone for first aid incidents, yet another tone for security incidents, and so-on. Not only that, but obviously a SMS message can contain information on where to go and what might be known about the incident, allowing a quicker and more appropriate response to problems.
Next up is Microsoft's Live Search, which I've already mentioned, and Google's Mobile Maps. I personally prefer Live to Google Mobile Maps here, but we've put them both on the phones so people can make their own choice. It isn't like it costs us anything after all. I'd be inclined to characterise GMM as prettier but WLS as probably more useful.
Last up is a tool that isn't really for use by the end users but which we've found quite good for customising the phone images, and that is HTCustom, a freeware tool that gives you easy access to a lot of the most common registry settings and hacks that you'd be likely to want to visit as part of tweaking a Windows Mobile device.
Experiences so far
We're still finding our way with these phones but they are already starting to prove their worth. I'm not entirely sure if being in touch with your office all the time is a blessing or a curse but most people are slowly getting used to the idea that they can be in touch all the time but that they don't have to answer every message or call straight away. One of the things that is now heavily emphasised in our training talks is how to turn the ringer on these phones off when you don't want to be disturbed.
Mailboxes need a bit more organisation; where someone receives a lot of email, such as my 100 or more messages a day, you don't want each single message pushed at you individually, especially when most of the messages are from mailing lists, status notifications, etc. Wanting to keep control of messages pushed out to each phone is meaning that high volume users need to consider message rules to sort things they don't want to know about straight away out of their inbox and into another folder. If you look at this then remember that as push email is a server-side process then any mail rules designed to help control it need to run server-side too. An Outlook client rule is of no help when your computer is turned off because you're in another country.
Tied to the point above is that your default settings should only be a starting point. Users will have different needs and should be helped to set up their devices to help them meet those needs properly. Users should be encouraged to change things to meet their needs and support staff should be able to deal with the increased support burden this brings. While you should work hard to keep the amount of 'official' supported devices to a minimum, you may well have to consider that more than one device is needed to meet the needs of all users.
Training is also important. Different levels of user might need different levels of assistance with getting started with a SmartPhone, both in terms of how they are introduced to the device and in terms of ongoing support. This might be expensive but the cost of supporting a phone so it can be used is always going to be less than the cost of giving someone a phone that they can't get to grips with.
Understand the costs of each phone. What will the contract cost over its term? What does the contract cover and what will the costs be of using something outside the contract (e.g. international roaming, for example). Don't forget the cost of any extra software you need to buy for each phone, and don't forget that things like batteries and spare styluses can almost be considered consumables.
Consider mobile access to other things besides email and calendar. Are there various apps your users might want to access on one of these devices? How will you support that? At the very least, if you have a internet or intranet website with information these users might want to look at (or show to others), how well does it display on a mobile web browser?