The industry as a whole has gotten more sophisticated in understanding the unique requirements that come with using tablets and smart phones. And businesses are moving beyond internal BYOD deployments to embracing the huge advantages of tablet kiosk marketing, mobile point of sale (mPOS), digital signage and countless other opportunities increasingly sophisticated tablets are offering.
The bad news? Deploying thousands of devices as a mobile POS is very different than deploying thousands of personal devices in a BYOD scenario. And if you're trying to use your in-place BYOD platform to deploy purposed mobile solutions, your deployment is going to fail.
At a very basic level: the requirements for a platform that manages personal devices are far different than the requirements necessary to manage purposed devices, both from a technical standpoint as well as a business process and workflow standpoint.
In BYOD deployments, your business user manages her device, and uses it in all arenas for both personal and enterprise data. Your focus--and the purpose of your BYOD software platform--is very simply maintaining the separation of that data and keeping enterprise information secure.
But on the purposed side, you are facing legions of users who need to be left out of managing the device. Your BYOD software solutions, while designed to manage a large fleet of mobile devices, do not have the capability—or focus--to deal with the complexity of multi-user mobile devices. And deploying and managing thousands of tablets in commercial shared-use environments creates significant technical and operational challenges that BYOD scenarios will never present.
Key issues include:
User experience, security, and monitoring challenges. You need to maintain both the physical and data security of your tablet kiosk solution, lock users out of personalization and management while maintaining your own control, and stay up-to-date on every aspect of the device, from battery to location to installed content to connectivity to app updates and more. And you need to manage, control, and secure every aspect of your mobile solution in real-time, from a central location.
All this plus the need to maintain the essential tablet experience, including access to the Internet and apps, but you need to lock down that access, ensure the experience is curated, and stay on top of security. You need to eliminate the possibility of customization or vandalism, and ensure users can't change or remove content, or worse, add content that's inappropriate. Users must also be prevented from interrupting network connectivity and ruining the experience of other guests who come after them.
Things like App Store purchases, iTunes downloads, deleting apps, rearranging icons, and changing the home screen wallpaper need to be disabled without affecting the user interaction experience and reducing the need to restore or re-image the tablet.
And finally, you need to safeguard your users as well, ensuring their personal information and their session information is cleared when the application quits, and that any information collected is encrypted and inaccessible to any other user.
Technical and device management challenges. Unlike your BYOD deployment, with personal devices safely in the hands of your employees, your fleet of purposed devices require constant maintenance, upkeep, and update after being battered by the public. From restores to refreshes to data caching, from pushing fresh dynamic content to uploading customer information and feedback, the day-to-day administration of mobile kiosks requires sophisticated management tools.
Purposed devices also require rapid development and accelerated deployment of content, end-to-end wireless network and mobile device visibility, and advanced system reliability, availability and scalability (RAS). The complexity of these environments makes routine BYOD tasks such as device and network component roll-outs, updates and maintenance and support/problem resolution difficult without a specifically designed mobile device management platform for commercial deployment.
BYOD platforms are not up to the challenge of delivering a fully secure, constantly updated, always-reliable mobile kiosk, mPOS, and digital signage experience. To ensure that your deployment is completely successful, rely on a mobile management platform specifically built to manage and monitor your innovative tablet solutions.
Check out our infographic, Purposed Devices vs. Personal Devices, to learn more about how managing mobile devices used as mobile point-of-sale, kiosks, digital signage or any other purposed use case is very different than managing personal devices.
Merrick Kennworth is a blogger that writes about many things including tech related issues for Moki Mobility. He has a passion for life and living it to its fullest. Follow them on Facebook to learn more.
