Have you tried Afaria ?

Murali_Shanmu · ‎07-26-2013

Recently, I have been hearing lot of updates with SAP's Enterprise Mobility Management product - Afaria. End of last year SAP did a revamp on the User Interface, made the on-boarding process much more simpler, provided option for administrators to securely deploy apps selectively to users without them needing to provide configuration details for each apps, Tighter integration with directory store and so on.

Gartner has also named SAP as a leader in this space. More details shared by milja.gillespie in her blog. One of the most interesting announcements which came out of SAPPHIRE NOW Conference in Orlando was SAP providing this service on Cloud for a 1€/device. This is a real game changer. More on this from Milja's blog

I wanted to share how easy the entire process was to on-board a user. It's just matter for few minutes to convert an employee's BYOD device into an Enterprise ready device. I have just put some screens to show what basic things come as part of the trial. If you are interested to learn more about each of the below options, I would recommend going to the Mobile Academy.

Register for a free trial - https://www.sapafaria.com/free_trial.php

Within 15 minutes my profile was setup in the server and I got an email to access my exclusive system.

The home page give statistics with regard to the OS's being in the registered devices and the carrier statistics. From this page, I can click on the Enroll devices to provide Username/Password and email ID. This will trigger a notification to my user's (employee) inbox.

I logged in as an employee from my Android phone and accessed the link in this email. After providing the credentials, I was taken to a Self Service portal, where I as an employee could Enroll new devices and also manage my devices. From here, I proceeded to enroll my android device using the prompts and installed the Afaria client (which takes us to the respective App store).

When I clicked on "Activate Enrollment Code", it opened the Afaria client App defaulting the code as shown above

With this my Android phone is hooked with Afaria Server. As an Administrator, If I go to the home page, I would be able to see the device OS and the carrier details.

In the Admin Console, I could see my Android device displayed along with some default Groups and Policies. Policies (Configuration and Application) are attached to a group which in turn are attached to devices.

From the device screen, I could monitor the activity of the enrolled devices - (calls made), lock the device, cease MDM control etc.

The policy screen, lists all the policies which are existing. The types displayed below are for enrollment, Configuration and Application. I shall not get into details of what each are. You can get more information from the Mobile Academy link at the top.

The groups screen shows the available group which are linked to the policies and devices. In my case,the group being referenced is "All Devices" which has 2 policies for Android devices and it has already found my device and applied these policies.

The Basic Check-in policy can force general rules on the device which includes password requirements, certificates setup, Bluetooth access, Application/Firewall policies. "SAP Store for Android" policy would display this particular app within my Afaria client. As an employee, I could then install this app. Afaria client allows you to groups apps by categories and allows administrators to push down apps relevant for the employee's Line of Business. The Employee will only get to see these Apps inside Afaria client.

Now, lets have a look at my Afaria Client Application. You can see below the Enterprise App store displays list of Applications pushed down to the employee by Afaria. SAP Store App is the only one available and its a featured App on the initial screen. Its not yet installed. You could also open up the menu to see the log information of the communication between the server and Afaria client. In my Android phone, I have lots of personal applications too.Its very common to see this if you have a BYOD policy in your organization. I heard that one of Afaria's strengths is the capability to delete a blacklisted App or even restrict the time a user spend on each of those Apps.