Building Windows Applications To Improve Productivity

Mobility is a massive trend in enterprises today bringing in new levels of efficiency and productivity into enterprises. Today, CIOs are not only utilising enterprise mobility to its optimum level but are also looking at new heights of customisation as far as these things are concerned.

Enterprise marketplaces are now a reality, and the IT organisation is looking at managing user profiles, applications and policies by setting in new rules and tracking mechanisms in place.

Microsoft has really gotten into the mobility game, albeit late, and brings in new levels of ease for enterprises to deploy their own application stores. Now, it’s important to remember that this is Microsoft, and most of the solutions built using this ecosystem will be extremely well integrated with the enterprise systems.

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This is something that has been conventionally a pain point for CIOs because of the number of devices coming into the market with their own set of restrictions and standards. It is extremely crucial that integration with current IT systems is taken care of, given the kind of functional requirements mobility holds for enterprises.
TechEd 2013 played host to a number of development sessions on making applications on the Windows platform, launching them on the Azure cloud, or even a private cloud, for that matter.

Some of the new feature sets that Microsoft is talking about can really change the way applications are deployed and managed in the enterprise. “Mobility has allowed employees to speed up the decision making process. The last such productivity gain was seen at the time that email became a commodity. Now, its mobility that is causing disruption in the enterprise,” explains Rahul Bagaria, Program Manager, Microsoft, who was speaking at the session.

According to Bagaria, “Windows Phone is completely enterprise friendly. It is a secure platform through which you can enable secure boot, bit locker encryption and various other user activities. There is a very flexible application development ecosystem, and you can more or less use whatever technology you are comfortable with to develop and manage the applications for your enterprise. You can distribute it using the device management system. The integrated device management concept enables end-to-end integration from one solution where you can mange all your windows devices.”

Windows Phone allows developing enterprise applications and hosting it on the application ecosystem. Employees can access the data securely, privately without any unauthorised application downloads. CIOs can decide user groups and when they are enrolled in the system, they can access the line of business applications earmarked for them.

In terms of ease of deployment and management, Microsoft has certainly started off on the right foot. Once a company account is signed up with Microsoft, there is no ongoing authentication/interaction with Microsoft, unlike other vendors like Apple’s iPhone for example. CIOs can have their own enterprise app marketplace, own quality control systems, remote wipe and management activities. The enterprise itself controls application distribution. So Microsoft recommends CIOs to authenticate your user groups and start distributing the applications. In addition to all this, Windows Phones allow complete control over the device. For example, an application coming from the enterprise marketplace will require user confirmation.

Keeping Windows Phone consumers in mind, the company has also made a decision to segregate personal and enterprise data. This basically implies that enterprise applications will not be able to access personal data and the reverse is true as well. This is something that will also help in user adoption, which can be quite a pain point in the long run.

Microsoft has made it easy for enterprises to build their own enterprise marketplace hosted on a cloud. First, an account needs to be set up in the development center. CIOs need not worry about the security aspect of hosting the marketplace on the cloud because a digitally signed certificate is required from Symantec to deploy the applications.

It’s really interesting to see the direction that Microsoft has taken as a company, and especially as a late entrant into the mobile ecosystem. However, they have managed to pack in quite a feature set that will make life easier not only for CIOs like yourselves, but also for your administrators who toil so hard to manage all the devices on your enterprise network.