Software : Interview: Microsoft promises mobile management without getting in the way

Interview: Microsoft promises mobile management without getting in the way

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As Microsoft adds more mobile device management features to both its own operating systems and its management tools, corporate vice president Brad Anderson is gunning for MDM software like AirWatch and MobileIron and Good. Microsoft can offer more features with a better experience at less than half the price, he says, thanks to what the cloud and enterprise team have learned by working with Office.

It's not just that more than 95% of companies are already using Active Directory and want to manage phones and tablets through the same system, it's also the combination of control for IT and a good user experience. "Working with them over the last eighteen months we've learned a lot from the Office team. The obsession the Office team has on the user experience; not being a hindrance, always being an enabler and making the user more productive. You can put the user first and foremost and you can do that without compromising what IT needs," he maintains.

Office for iPad and the version of Office that will come for Android are designed to be managed by Microsoft's cloud management service Intune, plus Microsoft will give companies a wrapper they can put around their own custom applications to protect them in the same way. "We're delivering first on iOS. We will support iOS. We support Google Android and 'Sandroid' (a porte-manteau term to describe Samsung's customised version of Android); there are a bunch of innovations Samsung is doing that we support."

Microsoft, the platform-agnostic company

And as native containers like Samsung Knox come out, Microsoft will work with those too. "We believe every device over time and every operating system is going to come out with some native way to separate personal from business. As Apple delivers whatever it's going to do on the device, we will support those. If we don't have to deliver a container, great! Samsung with Knox has done a great job. You can't write and deploy an app in iOS that gets a global view of everything on the device. There are certain things only the company that manufactures the device and the operating system can do and for those devices the OS vendor will do the best implementation of container technology."

But it's the experience in Office and Outlook that Anderson believes gives Microsoft its edge. "What's the first application businesses want to protect on a device? Email. So the MDM companies have all built their own email clients as part of this; you get their email application and I have yet to talk to a customer that is happy with those email applications. These companies are trying to compete against the native mail applications on this device and against Outlook and they can't do it. The experience they deliver is nowhere near as delightful as what we're going to deliver with Office."

And yes, Office includes Outlook. "Nearly everyone in the world is familiar with Outlook. Customers say to us 'if only I had Outlook on Android; if only I had it on iPad'. It's coming, baby! We will give businesses the choice, whether they want the native application or they want use Outlook. And there will be things in Outlook on iOS and Android that will not be in the native email app."

Anderson also wants to get away from the image of MDM as locking devices down so much that you don't want to use them (which helped make BlackBerry handsets unpopular in the same way overuse of Microsoft's desktop management tools drove users to bring their own tablets and notebooks to work). "Group policy was not built with the user front and centre," he admits. "All too often group policy was abused so the way end users saw it was long login times, decreased battery life - all they saw was their experience was degraded. Intune is kind of the new group policy from the cloud but we're thinking what productivity and what management means in the context of the cloud, with the user being the central design point. We want to be enablers not barriers."

Outlook email client coming to Android

Yes, companies need to control company information, but that doesn't mean locking everything down. "The user is the ultimate authority on their device. IT should be the ultimate authority in terms of data on device." Because Active Directory knows who users are and what roles they have in the business, companies can use that, with the security controls in the Office apps and the file-level controls in the Azure Rights Management Service, to make sure that you can't copy information from a work document into a Gmail message, but you can send it to a colleague using Outlook on your iPad. "We can enable copy and paste between your business applications but disable someone copying the same thing and pasting it into Facebook. And with Azure RMS you can natively integrate security into the document. That's integrated into Office and Office documents are more than 70% of the documents shared around the world," Anderson points out.

That's where you get to what Microsoft can do differently for devices. "The container and the settings are the sliver where mobile device management companies are playing today. Our strategy is multi-tier; protect at the device level, protect at the application level and we can also protect at the file level. We're the only one doing this; MobileIron, AirWatch, Good – they are not doing this. It all starts with identity and none of the other MDM vendors are doing that."

That matters for keeping information inside your company in ways he's surprisingly familiar with. "It turns out that Brad Anderson is not a unique name. There's a Brad Anderson over at Dell. I can't tell you the number of times I got email from his direct reports because of the autocomplete in Outlook. There was nothing the user was trying to do to compromise the company but I got data I wasn't supposed to have."

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iOS 8 may split-screen iPad apps, just like the Microsoft Surface

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There's no logical reason why the iPad shouldn't be able to do split-screen multitasking as well as the tablet, and with iOS 8 the feature might actually arrive.

That's what 9to5Mac is saying after speaking with "sources with knowledge of the enhancement in development."

With Apple's next major iOS update, these sources said, the iPad will gain the ability to use two applications simultaneously, each taking up one half of the tablet's screen.

The iPad may be the leader in the tablet space, but this is one thing it could definitely learn from Microsoft's Surface.

The student becomes the teacher

Microsoft has always positioned the Surface as more of a productivity or work-oriented tablet than Apple has done with the iPad.

Microsoft even highlighted Surface's multi-tasking superiority over the iPad in its advertisements.

But the dancing executives from Microsoft's other Surface ads aren't the only ones who could take advantage of the feature.

Apple could even do Microsoft one better by allowing side-by-side apps to interact with one another.

The company is reportedly working on the tools that would enable developers to let their apps share information with other apps, for example users could drag images or text in between the two apps.

From mini to massive

As they have with past iOS updates that added new capabilities, app developers may need to revisit existing apps to enable split-screen functionality and possibly even sharing between apps.

The multitasking feature is said to only work in landscape mode and possibly only on larger iPads, not the iPad mini.

However it could also be a hint that Apple really is working on the bigger iPad that's been rumored for so long.

Whatever the reality, here's hoping we find out more soon.

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Wednesday, May 14, 2014