It used to be so easy.

IT departments got to define just what could be used by a company’s staff. Everything from PCs to laptops to phones was in their purview, and everything that could be controlled was - locked down and managed to make sure that nothing went wrong.

But then came a rash of new devices, of new services, and a new generation of staff.

They’d grown up with a flexible world, and they wanted nothing less from their employers.

At least Windows group policies meant that a proliferation of desktop PCs could be managed, but how could new mobile devices be controlled - and how could potentially expensive roaming bills be managed?

Laptops were safely under control, as tools like iPass gave businesses the  ability to manage WiFi access, with one flat fee for each user every month, rather than having to pay expensive hotspot roaming rates.With WiFi now a common smartphone feature, it can also be used to avoid data roaming costs(as well as delivering more bandwidth than slow and congested 3G data services). That’s where iPass’ new strategy comes in, as instead of just delivering Windows and Windows Mobile clients, there are also Mac, iPhone and Symbian versions of the software - with more to come. There’s another advantage here, as the same username and password can be used with mobile devices as well as with laptops, keeping billing to the same single flat fee per user.

We recently spent some time with the iPass iPhone client, and were pleasantly surprised that it worked around the device’s limitations effectively (and  still works happily with OS 3.0). There’s a BlackBerry client on the horizon now, too, which will make it a lot easier for roaming BlackBerry users to avoid racking up their bills (though there still needs to be a better way of managing which browser you’re using on a BlackBerry). And of course these are tools you can push out to users, using device management suites to make sure that only devices with WiFi hardware get the software they need.

Tools like this mean one simple thing: any device is an enterprise device.

And you know? That’s a good thing.

–Simon

We recently met up with Jon Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO. During our conversation he talked about the philosophical difference between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome, he suggested was “A window into the web”, marked by its lack of toolbars and its integration of Google’s web services.

This morning we woke up to the news that Chrome the browser is also the front end to Chrome the OS, a thin Linux kernel with a browser intended for netbooks. It’s not Android, but it shares some key concepts - and will run on Intel and ARM processors. There’s still a lot missing from what Google’s said, and much remains to be revealed when Chrome OS finally arrives on hardware - but part of me is wondering if Google has fallen into what I think of as “The Gilder Trap”.

George Gilder was sort of famous in the early days of the Internet. He wrote a couple of popular economics textbooks, and one of his suggestions was that wired and wireless would swap places. Data would flow through the airwaves, into pocket devices and all manner of mobile computing hardware. After all, in the air bandwidth was essentially free. Sadly he missed a trick or two. Bandwidth may be free, but the hardware needed to support it certainly wasn’t - and the back haul from base stations to the wider network needs to be hefty. Copper and fibre still remain the most bandwidth efficient way of delivering that last mile, and wireless data is really only just starting to get significant traction - and is already starting to creak at the seams, especially in busy city centres, as well as in the country. Even so, people still believe his 1990s words…

You may think the 50:1 contention ratio for your home DSL connection is high, but that’s nothing compared to the connectivity at a central London cellular base station. Your 3G data card may well be connected at 3 or even 7Mbps, but there’s often not more than a 1Mbps SDSL connection from the base station to the net - and you’re sharing that with everyone else. Trying to get email over a 3G dongle can be trial, especially at peak hours.

Now imagine having to do that with a million other people using Chrome OS-powered netbooks.

Sure, many of them will be hooked up to “free” WiFi connections, but don’t expect them to remain free for long when the costs of running the services increase with a sudden massive leap in demand. Cloud services are bandwidth hungry, pushing expensive UI functionality down to local devices. Google’s Chrome OS’s reliance on Google’s online services (even with Gears’ offline web functionality) will fundamentally change the economics of offering wireless services - and not in a good way for the network operators.

Gilder, like many of the proponents of free services, was right to say that the digital world makes many things essentially free to the end user. However, again like many of today’s freevangelists, he was wrong to ignore the costs of infrastructure. Yes, 0.01p is almost zero, but when a hundred million people are using that low cost service, that fraction of a penny quickly adds up into sizable amounts of pounds.

That’s why there’s minimal cellular data service in huge parts of the world, and why travelling on the Tube cuts you off. It’s just too expensive.

We won’t be “always connected” as much as we want to be - especially in the current economic climate. Capital and operating expenses are being slashed across the board, and even giants like Vodafone are looking to buy other networks just to get access to their base stations. Rolling out the network needed for Chrome OS to be everything that Google wants will take time, and will also take truckloads of money.

Always on and always connected are wonderful ideals - but that’s all they are. It took me a long time to realise this, even as I spent years consulting on massive wireless Internet projects. Chrome OS needs free wireless bandwidth, and that’s not something that’s going to happen for a long time - and a massive spike in demand is something that could push it even further away.

I’d like to be wrong. I like Chrome the browser, I like the Chrome OS concept - and I’m especially fond of many of the HTML 5 features that Google is building into its latest applications and services. The web needs an upgrade, and Google is driving that upgrade.

The web isn’t the only thing that needs an upgrade - wireless data networks (as much as Telstra and the like talk about HSPA+ deployments) need a massive amount of work. However I’ve come to know the restrictions of the mobile networks, and the economic realities facing their operators. Without substantial infusions of cash, that upgrade is a long long way off.

It’s a problem that affects us all - not just Google and Chrome OS. We’re being sold a hyper-connected online world where everything’s available 24 hours a day, wherever we are - what we used to call “Martini computing”: any time, any place. What we’re actually getting is wireless networks like AT&T and O2 which are struggling to cope with the minimal demands of iPhone users. How are they going to cope with bandwidth hungry Chrome OS users running their entire lives through online services?

Google could just have fallen into an old, old hype trap.

Google is a company that’s built itself on a basis of abundance - cheap CPU, cheap memory, cheap disk. Mobile operators manage a world of scarcity, and work hard to make sure that things remain scarce and expensive. They’re two diametrically opposed views - and Chrome OS is where they’re going to collide.

The real war isn’t Google vs Microsoft. It’s going to be Google vs the mobile operators. I’m just not sure that Google is going to win.

–Simon

It’s probably about buying market share and reducing the competition that drives down prices, but there’s a new problem for mobile operators to think about these days - bandwidth and backhaul.

No matter how fast the 3G chipset in your mobile phone, you’re not getting on the Internet at that speed; you might have 3, 7 or 14Mbps between your phone and the base station but that base station is connected into the net at the same DSL speed as your home broadband. And you’re sharing that with everyone else  connected to that base station; say the 50 people in the same mile radius on the same network. Wimax and LTE promise speeds of 80-100Mbps; that means backhaul will have to get much faster and wider - according to a recent In-Stat report, backhaul capacity has to triple by 2013 to a worldwide total of 90,000Gbps to match demand. To get faster speeds needs faster physical  connections; faster DSL, expensive fibre optic cable or laser links. And that costs money…

Vodafone and T-Mobile both use BT for backhaul. Last year Vodafone started rolling out Tellabs’s Ethernet-based backhaul to replace the legacy voice network it was previously built on top of (getting an IP network for next-generation services at the same time);or rather BT is doing it for them (it’s all part of the ’21st Century Network’). O2 is taking the same service, and T-Mobile had signed up for it a year before that. Currently the system promises to deliver up to 60Mbps (a big improvement on the 2Mbps at most base stations). If T-Mobile is further along with the rollout, buying them could give Vodafone better bandwidth faster - and in the long run that could be worth as much as buying market share.

T-Mobile users might want to cross their fingers that the deal goes through (which is far from certain). Coverage and the weather and device configuration and the number of other people around and whole bunch of other variables make it hard to compare networks precisely, but of all the networks I test phones with Vodafone consistently gives me the best connection and coverage.
-Mary

What’s the difference between me walking down the hall, head down and totally absorbed in reading email on my BlackBerry because I didn’t stop to do it before I left the hotel room (well, the coffee is downstairs), and Jim Balsillie co-CEO of RIM walking down the hall so absorbed in reading email on his BlackBerry that he doesn’t hear me say good morning? Mainly that he has the good manners to have a member of staff walk with him so he doesn’t walk into anyone; I’ve never noticed anyone leaping out of my way to avoid getting trampled because you simply don’t notice when you’re that absorbed but I have taken some sudden swerves in railway stations to get out of the path of an oncoming commuter with their eyes fixed on their device so I assume it works both ways.

If your users carry BlackBerrys you can give them a little more to get absorbed in by rolling out the new BES 5. you’re going to want to; if the automatic failover for redundancy, manual failover for maintenance and 64-bit support don’t grab you, you’ll like the full Web-based remote admin (although it does need ActiveX in the browser). They’ll like email flags, being able to file messages and manage folders and - if you enable it - better access to fileshares behind your company firewall.

That’s all instant gratification of a sort, which appeals to the lizard brain. After the other CEO of RIM, Mike Laziridis, introduced BES 5 and celebrated ten years of BlackBerry (and 25 years of RIM) and Bob IBM of RIM showed off some very IBM-centric predictions about the evolution of enterprise collaboration based on smartphones and contextual information (which would have been visionary a year ago and now are just documenting established trends), ex-Disney Imagineer and US intelligence service CTO Eric Haseltine talked a lot about the lizard brain and how to take advantage of it to move your company in the right direction, because it isn’t going away any time soon.
Concept cars matter to the car industry because they show you a physical object you can imagine using rather than describing a service you can’t. The concrete, visual, tactile, tangible prototype appeals to the other big part of the brain, the visual and processing area. And given that in every enterprise the urgent trumps the important and most decisions are the emotional lizard brain arguing with the rational brain, you can do with getting more of the brain on your side.

At Disney Haseltine worked on the Park PDA; back in the 90s this was a handheld device that did everything from video conferencing to games. Of course the killer app wasn’t any of the big concept ideas; it was the text message that told you where in the park Mickey Mouse was so you could go get a photo of your kids with the rodent. Your smartphone can do a lot of that today, but Disney still does great business selling the Pal Mickey; a gadget that knows when you’re standing in line for a ride and likely to be bored, buzzes to offer your kids a secret message and uses a proximity sensor so that when they hold it up to their ear it can whisper at them about the ride they’re queuing for.

Haseltine’s point isn’t so much that your big idea is never go to match what users actually want but that the sooner you can give them something to try out, the sooner you’ll find out what they do want - and then you can use that to move a little further in your long-term direction, supported by users who are getting what they want as well. The people who will be most likely to take the time to try your prototype and give you useful reactions are not just the early adopters but the ones who are actually suffering in some way because they can’t do what they need; there’s always more incentive to get out of the discomfort zone.

And for support, don’t turn to executives or the formal development process; he suggested looking to the counterculture, the “underground informal rebel alliance who think the bureaucracy doesn’t get it”. Every company has them, and if you’re in IT you’ll probably have quite a few working with or for you. They’re going to be doing some unapproved skunkworks projects, so they might as well be something that suits your agenda.

His favourite recent example is the billions of dollars that the various US intelligence agencies spent on knowledge management and collaboration tools which had the same success as any other KM project; utter failure. (When we first watched Criminal Minds we assumed the show didn’t want to reveal the sophisticated IT the FBI must be using; I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that a technical analyst who could retrieve information from a variety of sources is something most FBI teams only dream of). Over at the CIA, a handful of agents got together and set up a completely unapproved and doubtless career-limiting copy of MediaWiki. Helped by the fact that a third of CIA officers are now what Haseltine calls “the Facebook and MySpace generation” (no figures on how many CIA agents are actually on Facebook), Intellipedia became something of a  sleeper hit, delivering the knowledge sharing all the formal systems never managed.

Smartphones came into business the way that PDAs and PCs did; because users who thought they would be useful just started using them and demanding that IT support them; social networking and IM arrived the same way. The best way of getting some control over whatever comes next is to be involved in bringing it into business; your counterculture revolutionaries will be in the thick of that and if you can give them enough rope to drag your agenda along you could kill two birds with one stone.
-Mary

If you think about it, whatever platform they are, smartphones are a horrible combination of complex networking and primitive computing, squeezed into a pocket-sized security threat. I wouldn’t be without mine, but whatever smartphone I happen to be using I always wish it worked better; at the moment I’m using an HTC Touch Pro and I wish I could tell why it sometimes runs so slowly it can’t rotate the screen when I slide open the keyboard. I might have got an answer to why an app I was testing kept giving me a blank screen rather sooner if I’d been able to show the software developers what I was (or wasn’t) seeing on screen. The problem was that they’re in California - and that week we were in Las Vegas. Your users might not travel that far, but they’re far more likely to have problems on their phones when they’re not in the office.

Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager is a good start for managing smartphones; but it doesn’t have a remote control option, which is a lot faster when you would rather check a setting or make a change yourself rather than talk the user through how to do it - and wait for them to take the phone away from their ear to do each step of the process and then tell you what they’ve done. Odyssey showed off its Athena mobile management software at the Microsoft Management Summit last week, which plugs into SCMDM and adds remote control and monitoring of everything from memory and processor usage to which applications are actually running. (Or you can use it to add mobile management to System Center Configuration Manager.)

Suppose you want to roll out a new version of the Compact Framework to all your Windows Mobile devices (or a line of business app that needs a new version); you can’t install it on a phone that’s currently running an app that uses the framework (like Live Search) so you can choose between having the update fail or rebooting phones that don’t need it (and upsetting any users who had unsaved data in a badly-written application). Athena can check registry keys, tell you what apps are running - and close them, or just terminate the key DLL for the Compact Framework.

Athena also has a range of ‘feature packs’ that you can add in to get everything from details of phone calls (so you can complain to the mobile operator with proof if users complain they keep losing the connection halfway through an important call) to how many text messages users are actually sending (so you know whether you’re on the best value tariff for what users actually do). One customer tracked data connection problems for some users down to a handful of mobile phone towers; it turned out the operator had forgotten to update them when it did a network upgrade. Because the problem you’re trying to track will probably make it hard to retrieve data from the phone at the time, the Athena agent on the phones can collect data up to every 15 minutes, although it usually only sends data once a day to stop it tying up the data connection. 

The GPS pack tells you where a phone is - handy if a user doesn’t know if it’s lost, stolen or left in their desk drawer (and where it’s been - the historical data means at least you know where it was before it was taken inside and lost the satellites).

If you’re using Wi-Fi for a secure connection, Windows Mobile will happily switch to an open access point if it happens to be a stronger signal, taking the device off the corporate network - so users no longer have access to the resources they’ll be trying to use. One manufacturing customer had the rugged handsets workers were using in the warehouse randomly drop off the network; they set up an event in Athena to take a snapshot of the system when the network changed and send that to System Center Configuration Manager as an event System Center Operations Manager could trigger. Next time the handsets switched off the network, the reports came back with the SSID of the access point they were connecting to - revealing that one of the employees was hiding an access point under a desk so they could work in the break room (which suggests to me that the company needs either better network coverage or comfier desk chairs).

And before you say that iPhones don’t have all those problems, think about managing a device where you can’t run anything in the background - so your agent can only work when the user asks it to - and the only people who can retrieve a catalogue of what applications are on the device are Apple. Every smartphone platform has its problems; Athena can help on Windows Mobile (and the company is considering BlackBerry support next - handy as we’re going to be at RIM’s Wireless Enteprise Symposium).

You can get a copy of Athena packaged up in a VHD ready to try out from www.odysseysoftware.com (although you have to sign up for a sales email rather than just being able to download it). The price varies with what feature packs you want, but if mobile support is costing you a lot, Athena could be a bargain. Another customer had users shipping ‘broken’ devices to the support department, 90% of which turned out to have nothing wrong with them, which is a waste of time as well as postage. Giving the helpdesk Athena’s remote tools reduced the number of devices sent in by over 85% - and the percentage with no fault found went down to 5%. And instead of spending 40 minutes on the phone on the average support call, the support team were off the line with the problems fixed in around 8-10 minutes.

-Mary

Why bother with local storage and heavyweight applications when you could just use the cloud? Because they always work, that’s why.

To prepare for six solid days of meetings and presentations, crowds, queues and the three-ring CES circus, we’ve been driving through the quiet, cold American southwest. It’s been extra quiet and peaceful without email and phone calls. It’s not that we swore off connectivity to take a holiday. It’s not that there isn’t 3G and HSDPA coverage out in the wilds. We didn’t forget to enable roaming or run out of battery and I have a bag-ful of handsets to try out… It’s that the cellular networks that serve the Navajo Nation and many of the surrounding counties don’t have international roaming agreements.

Yes, there’s hotel and motel Wi-Fi - but you’re often sharing a very slow DSL connection with everyone else in the hotel that everyone else is using to upload their photos to Flickr. Plus, you don’t want to be tied to the hotel when you’re wanting to explore.

Cloud services and cloud storage are great for collaboration and for having files available on any machine you happen to pick up. But switching entirely to the cloud assumes that the network is always there, always working, always fast enough, always cheap enough and doesn’t run down your battery too much. Back in the real world, it’s too easy to run out of power or drive out of range for online to be your only option. And don’t say it’s a contrived case and only a few people will be driving around wanting to do email or update their diary in Monument Valley: there are plenty of places in Las Vegas where you can’t get connected either.
-Mary

I wouldn’t be surprised to open a packet of cornflakes

I’ve been spending some time with the iPhone 2.0 software, and I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised with many of the new enterprise features.

Setting up an iPhone to connect to an Exchange server was quick, and relatively painless. Apple’s implementation of ActiveSync supports self-issued server certificates directly, and so smaller businesses can work the CEO’s iPhone without having to set up an expensive third-part certificate. Apple does provide a tool for helping configure multiple devices, and if you don’t use it each phone will have to be set up by hand, so you may prefer to stick with Blackberry or Windows Mobile for ease of management.

There is one big omission which will hamper the iPhone’s enterprise uptake: mail isn’t encrypted. So if your business is regulated in any way, and your staff work with sensitive information, then the iPhone - version 2.0 or not - will be strictly off limits. The fact there’s also no remote wipe (Apple says you can use Exchange’s tools for this, but our test device couldn’t be seen in Exchange’s device management tools) or device management beyond setup tools will also count against Apple’s latest software releases. Until Apple really understands the needs of enterprises the iPhone will remain the shiny phone on the CEO’s desk, not the workhorse device used by hundreds and thousands of staff.

Still, it is only a second generation device, and there’s plenty of time for Apple to fix its deficiencies.

If you really do want to use the iPhone with Exchange, what’s the experience like? We took some screenshots to show you what you and your users will see.

Making the inital connection is easy - all you need are an email address, a user name and password, and the DNS name of the Exchange server on the public internet. Once connected to an Exchange server you can manage accounts from the iPhone’s settings menu. You’re able to quickly switch functions, as well as choosing just how much mail is synchronised.

Mail can be pushed automatically using Exchange’s built-in ActiveSync (Apple has licensed it from Microsoft), or can be collected on a schedule. If you’re roaming and need to keep data bills to a minimum, switching to a manual fetch will help keep data traffic to a minimum - as well as increasing battery life!

Once you’ve set up Exchange mail, you’ll be able to see a list of all the mail folders in your Exchange account. The iPhone (unlike other mobile devices) will only automatically synchronise your main inbox, and you’ll need to manually download the contents of any other folders you wish to read.

Of course Apple handles HTML mail just fine, and you’ll get a good overview of your mailbox contents with headers and the first couple of lines of any message.

Mail doesn’t take up that much space - a large Exchange account (with sensible download windows) will only take a few tens of MB out of the iPhone’s 8 or 16GB storage. That leaves you plenty of space for applications - which already include tools from Salesforce.com and from Oracle. Applications download from the App Store, and open from the familiar launcher.

(Oh yes, and the new iPhone software makes it easy to take screenshots - just hold down the home button and tap the power switch. The screen will fade for a moment and you’ll find the image in the device’s camera roll.)

–Simon

I’m guessing that most of you

Yesterday Sir Arthur C. Clarke died, on the far side of the world, a long way from the Somerset coast where he first dreamed of the stars.

We may think of him as the man behind the books and the films, as the bone spinning in the air shifts into a spaceship orbiting the earth, but it’s his ideas that have help shape our modern world - both from the engineers he inspired by his stories, and from his own scientific writings and papers.

It’s not many people who have a whole ring around the world named after them. The Clarke Orbit has become shorthand for geostationary orbit, home of the myriad communication satellites that bind our world together. It was his paper in Wireless World, back in 1945, that first suggested a network of satellites that could cover the world from an orbit that kept pace with the spinning globe below. He probably didn’t imagine that there’d be so many, or that there’d be so much traffic passing through them.

It’s these satellites that started the development of the globe spanning network we’ve come to know as the Internet, revolutionising the world. Satellite phones bring the most isolated village to your door, while TV images show us the faces our neighbours. Without communication satellites there’d have been no LiveAid - at least until after film and video of famine had spent weeks being trekked out of isolated refugee camps. The world has become a smaller place, but it’s also become a closer one.

Satellites aren’t Clarke’s only contribution to the world. During the Second World War he was one of the team of engineers that developed radio-beam controlled landing techniques. If you’ve been on an airliner landing at night - or in fog - you’ve benefited from his work (which he wrote about in his book Glide Path). He also was one of the first to suggest that satellites could be used to deliver information that could be used to improve weather forecasts, spotting weather hundreds of miles out to sea.

Clarke was an early user of email, and he published a book in 1984 of his email collaboration with Peter Hyams on the film of 2010, a fascinating document of the early days of a technology we now take for granted. Email and handhelds were a recurring feature of his novels (especially later works like Imperial Earth), and he regularly explored the theme of a highly connected communicating society - expressing the hope that it would finally bring down the barriers between people and nations.

Engineers were often the heroes of his stories, along with auditors and administrators. His was fiction for the makers and the doers, for the people who took the visions of his stories and started to build a better future. While SpaceShip One and the X-Prize owe a lot to US science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, it’s Clarke who inspired work on space elevators and on solar sails - efforts he hoped would be his lasting gift to the world.

I’m one of those who were inspired by his books. I started young, with his early works (which were what we’d now label Young Adult) and with his short fiction. I wrote my degree dissertation on communication satellites, and spent the first few years of my life working as an electronics engineer - first on radar systems, and then on the electromagnetic launch technologies he explored in stories like Earthlight. I was privileged to meet him once, in 1992 on what was one of his last visits to the UK, in his home town of Minehead.

Vale Sir Arthur.