Bring your own Device is changing Enterprise IT

In the not to distant past most companies had a unilateral policy on cell phones. You were given one by the company and it was a BlackBerry, or it was a Windows Mobile etc, and there was a mandate that you had to use it. The company provided it, you used it, and more often than not you walked around with another personal phone that you actually wanted to own and use.

Today, more and more companies are adopting a BYOD or ‘bring your own device’ approach. The Apple iPad was pinpointed, by research Forrester did on the subject, as what started to consolidate the shift that was preceded by the iPhone, as company executives brought it with them to the office and challenged IT to support it.

Far from IT departments having the ability to strictly dictate the mobile of their ecosystems, they are being challenged by personal smartphone preference. The Forrester report cites 59 percent of companies that were surveyed enabled employees to bring their own phones to work.

Another factor is the rise in remote or on-the-move working. Whereas in the past company workers had found themselves logging onto the corporate VPN from a laptop or PC, many companies use Google Docs or Hosted SharePoint making access easier to “just connect” using web security protocols such as OAuth. Many analysts and government bodies are predicting this as being the future of IT.

We’ve long been an advocate of this ‘martini’ anytime/anywhere type policy of working with data from mobile devices. It’s the future, plain and simple. This is why we very early built out a comprehensive mobile strategy that focused on supporting all the major mobile devices ie. iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone.

It’s also the reason why we’ve concentrated on providing governance and e-compliance features that work against what we believe will become the real challenge of corporate IT, that of the sprawl of public and private Cloud Services.

We will continue to focus on this throughout 2012 and broaden not only our supported data cloud offerings but we will also also release support for other SaaS services, some of which are in beta now with some of our customers.

We will continue to expand governance options and integration with Corporate IT, and best of all if you want to host all this in your own data centre, you can using our Cloud Appliance which supports VMware, XEN, and KVM environments.

We believe 2012 will be looked back on as the year that two key themes converged in corporate IT, that of mobile working and Cloud Computing, and we are looking forward to working with existing and new customers to support it.

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Cloud File Manager for Windows Phone 7 updated to support Mango

We’ve now updated our Windows Phone 7 Cloud File Manager to support Windows Mango and this release is now live on the Windows Market.

The release features:

– Updated to support Mango

– Added ability to upload a file directly from the web

– Added share file link to social networks (Windows Live, Facebook,LinkedIn, Twitter etc)

– Now integrates deeper with Pictures hub – pictures can be uploaded (shared) directly from it.

– Added cloud tags and browse files by tags.

– Various other bug fixes and enhancements

SMEStorage for Windows Phone is one of the many client tools for the SMEStorage Open Cloud Platform, enabling data access for multiple different Storage Clouds, and providing additional features and services above the Cloud Providers.

As with all SMEStorage clients, SMEStorage Cloud File Manager for Windows Phone 7 supports:

Amazon S3, Amazon Cloud Drive, RackSpace Cloud Files, OpenStack, Box.net, Windows Live SkyDrive, Windows Live Mesh 2011 (read only), Windows Azure, Microsoft SharePoint, Google Docs, Google Storage, Google Apps Mail, GMail-as-a-Cloud, Google Sites, PogoPlug devices, DropBox, iDisk/MobileMe, Mezeo, Zimbra, FilesAnywhere, CloudMe, SafeSync, Email-as-a-Cloud, FTP-as-a-Cloud, Alfresco, S3 compatible Clouds, Office365 and any WebDAV compliant cloud – within one virtual file system.

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Windows Mobile 7 Support – Progress

Support for Windows Mobile 7 has always been on our RoadMap. We view it as a strategic handset client, and we’re happy to say that the App is close to being completed. The screenshots below give an idea of how it will finally look:

We hope to have an App in the Windows Marketplace by the beginning of July.

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