Now it can be told: Mobile Device Manager is revealed
OK! The baby-having went great. Alex, my baby son, is super-cute.
Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled the product I've been working on, so I can finally talk about it. It's called... wait for it... Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008. (I was pulling for "Microsoft's Super-Awesome System Center Windows Mobile Server-Client Device-a-magoo 2008 A.D., Created in Redmond, Washington, United States, Earth, the Solar System, the Universe," but they went with the shorter name.) You can read an overview of the features here. The idea is to give businesses an easy way to manage the Windows Mobile devices they give to employees, while also giving them a secure connection to the company network.
Hopefully this will get more enterprises on the Windows Mobile bandwagon. I've mentioned that I love my HTC TyTn, and it's definitely made me more productive; being able to check e-mail and calendar items while on the go has been huge. It's just nice being able to get caught up on all my e-mails while riding the bus to work from Seattle; I couldn't do that before. Plus, the number of useful apps that are out there in the "cloud" (Buzzwords Acheivement Unlocked! 50 BloggerPoints) is amazing; there's an app for almost everything. Really cool. (I'm a particular fan of Handmark's Monopoly, which is obviously great for productivity, and teaches... umm... business acumen?)
By the way, if you haven't gotten Live Search for Mobile, you must do that NOW. Browse to http://m.live.com on your device to download it. It's amazing; there's even voice-activated search. The movie times feature alone makes the device worth the purchase price. (Which, for me, was, well, $0. But you can't really put a price on knowing that the Egyptian Theater is showing Spice World at midnight on Saturday.)
Now, in order to get enterprises on board with Mobile, we had to insert some negative functionality. That's just the reality of having to adhere to the needs of businesses; there might be productivity, compliance, or other business reasons for shutting down programs and features. Apparently, one of our most requested features was the ability to prevent Internet Explorer from executing. And that's essentially what I've been working on; it's called "Application Allow and Deny", or, alternatively, "blocklisting" and "allow-listing". With MSCMDM'08, IT pros can provision XML to block in-ROM applications in future Windows Mobile releases; we expect to support blocking Internet Explorer, Windows Live Messenger, Remote Desktop Mobile, Market Place, and Internet Sharing, but you could block other in-ROM apps like Calculator or Solitaire (if you really want to be mean). There's also a friendly customizable UI message that pops up when the user tries to run a blocked app, informing him/her that, due to company policy, the program can't be run.
Fortunately, not all the functionality I worked on was negative, because that would be downright depressing. We also implemented the "allow-list". IT Pros already had the ability to restrict usage of unsigned in-RAM applications; this feature lets them create exceptions to that rule, enabling specified unsigned applications to run regardless of the device's unsigned app policy. I imagine this would be most useful for custom apps that the user might need to run for work, or really any situation where the IT Pro wants to enable the use of an app without having to sign it and distribute it.
I'll talk more about this feature as more information becomes public. Meanwhile, enjoy the stock bump! (I'm literally $24 richer today than yesterday... on paper! AWESOME.)
