Managing Mobile Unified Communications

Unified Communication with focus on mobile solutions is the focal point of many vendors’ offering today. As a Systems Integrator it will be increasingly important to understand how an enterprise can and should manage its mobile devices. The more office functionality that is pushed into mobile devices the more administration, management and security control will become important. However, most UCC vendors do not have a mobile device management (MDM) solution in their solutions and thus the SI and channel partner is left to choose and test what works.

Mobile Unified Communications

Unified Communications allow employees to communicate using voice, messages and sharing their desktop. It integrates with conferencing features that allow employees to participate in meetings and discussions without moving away from their computer. By combining information from various directories with presence information allows the users that wants to initiate a communication session to choose an appropriate time and method to do so.

Mobile UC gives these users the option of doing the same while on foot, wherever they want. Mobile UC does not focus on a technology, but rather the device used, but it is recommended to look into the needs of the users when choosing a mobile technology to support. Wi-Fi is excellent in office environments, but home based Wi-Fi can be less reliable as well as a potential security risk. 3G and 4G technologies allow users to access UC features on mobile devices wherever they have mobile coverage. Most organizations should not consider a solution that only supports one or the other, but a combination of these technologies.

The ability to access business applications, communication features and being able to interact in the same way that employees do in the office will improve productivity and efficiency especially in time critical projects. For distributed organizations as well as international companies this will become an even more critical feature. Mobile UC gives employees simultaneous access to desktop applications as well as communications and collaboration tools in many forms and on many devices.

Mobile Unified Communications Requires Mobile Device Management

Mobile Device Management (MDM) is a software-based solution that is used to monitor and manage, secure and support mobile devices independent of what mobile provider and what applications they use from software providers. Typically it would be able to send configuration and administration settings to these devices over-the-air. The solution should be able to support both enterprise owned as well as BYOD (bring your own device) scenarios where the employee pays for their own devices where the MDM solution secures the device without taking full control over it and by controlling and protecting the data and configuration settings for all devices that connect to the enterprise network, it can greatly reduce support costs and business risks. Administrators, however, cannot expect to have the same access to mobile device clients as they would have to desktop devices that don't leave an office

MDM solutions should also be able to deliver online content and applications to standardize the work environment used on mobile devices.

To secure the devices mobile web apps can be a solution where both the data and the applications actually resides on a web server that is run from a secured data center. That means that nothing is installed in the end user device.

Users access corporate information with the use of a web browser on the mobile device and a login account. And if a user wants to use his or her own personal device, there is no need for the employer to actually provide such device. These apps work both on the mobile (company or employee owned) and since the same apps and data also can be made to work on traditional desktop computers and laptop computers, the BYOD concept can be supported for computers as well.

Mobile Device Management might be out of scope for many system integrators today, but in a near future it must be part of the portfolio to enable mobile unified communication and collaboration across devices.