As a mother, news of Apple’s iBooks textbooks for iPad is a weight off my shoulders — and my kid’s.

My son is in middle school, and while a lot has changed since I was in eighth grade, one thing I can relate to is his backpack. Every morning, the poor kid walks to school with an extra-large L.L. Bean backpack slung over his shoulder, filled to the brim with textbooks, folders, lunch and gym clothes that combined must weigh a good 25 pounds. Textbooks must make up at least half of that. School administrators encourage kids to leave unneeded textbooks in their lockers, but with only five minutes between classes, that never happens. At night, my son lugs all his textbooks home again to do his homework.

Meanwhile, he complains about a sore neck and shoulders, and the nurse sends home a note every year about early signs of scoliosis. Not a good scene.

Enter iBooks textbooks for iPad, a new Apple initiative announced yesterday. At 1.35 pounds, the iPad is one of the heavier tablets on the market, but compared to a backpack full of hardcover books, it’s a veritable feather. I hope tablet-based textbooks take off, if for no other reason than our childrens’ health.

For years, Apple has tried to corner the education market, flooding schools with glowing iMacs and offering parents steep discounts on desktops and laptops. The hope was that students raised on a diet of Apple products would grow up in to Apple-using adults. I, for one, was never tempted, because the Mac’s ease-of-use argument was never compelling enough to make up for the cost differential with a regular Windows PC.

The iPad value proposition is different. It has ease of use as well as ease of portability. With price points in the hundreds of dollars, not thousands, tablets could emerge as a relatively affordable educational tool that parents can feel good about giving their kids.

What iBooks textbooks for iPad mean for IT

As an enterprise IT journalist, the prospect of teenagers with iPads raises a larger question: that of an emerging workforce that is more familiar with tablets and touchscreens than they are with desktops and mice; better versed in iOS than in Windows; more comfortable texting than sending an email. In a few short years, the target audience for iBooks textbooks for iPad will start entering the workforce, and it makes you wonder: How will those young adults fit into the traditional workplace, dominated by Windows PCs?

I already hear the beginnings of this shift at home. The other day my son looked over at me typing away on a Word document and asked, “Mom, why does your company still use Microsoft Office?” When I asked him what he meant and what we should be using, he suggested Google Docs.

“It’s so much more convenient for sharing,” he said. I reluctantly had to admit that attaching and emailing documents around in Exchange and using the Track Changes feature doesn’t really constitute “convenient.”

Speaking of Exchange, I can’t help but notice that teenagers don’t get email anymore (except from their moms). They text, they Facebook, they chat, but they don’t email. (Come to think of it, with their headphones on, they don’t really talk anymore, either.)

These changes in communication styles will also become an issue when the next generation enters the workforce. And in 2020, when my son graduates from college, it will be up to the IT managers at his first job to answer his “why does the company still use Microsoft?” question.

VMware updated its View clients for Apple iPads and Android tablets today, and View shops will soon have an Amazon Kindle Fire client as well.

The tech previews of VMware View clients with PC-over-IP (PCoIP) support for Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux are also available. Previously, View clients for Mac OS X only supported Remote Desktop Protocol, which meant poor performance.

“We should have waited for PCoIP before delivering those clients,” said Pat Lee, director of end user clients for VMware. “But all of our clients now support PCoIP.”

The use case for running virtualized Windows OSes and applications on mobile devices using a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) client lies mostly in education — universities that want to adopt server-based desktops to deliver university apps on Macs, Kindle Fire and other student-owned devices, Lee said. And broad client device support is important to companies with bring your own device policies.

VMware has faced criticism for having a very short list of View clients, compated to competitor Citrix’s client support list, which still includes far more tablets and smartphones. There aren’t VMware View clients for the iPhone or Blackberry devices, for instance. VMware admits it must support all types of client devices in order to gain new VDI customers and will continue to grow its client support list, Lee said.

The existing clients integrate with View 4.6 and 5.0, and all are available for free to View customers. They are available from Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market and, for Cisco Cius users, Cisco’s AppHQ. In addition, VMware View for Linux is available to download from the Ubuntu Software Center, and the Kindle Fire client will be available in the Amazon Appstore for Android this month.

Diversify, diversify, diversify! It’s common advice in the investment world, especially when the economy’s not looking so rosy. The theory is, if you hold stakes in lots of different kinds of companies, the failure of one company (or even a whole industry) won’t sink your entire portfolio.

For years, the bulk of Research in Motion’s eggs have been in one basket: BlackBerry smartphones. And it was quite the lucrative basket. But now, thanks to the consumerization of IT, the BlackBerry is losing its grip on the enterprise market. So, naturally, RIM is diversifying.

The company today announced BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, a BlackBerry mobile device management (MDM) service that will also manage iPhones, iPads and Android devices.

Mobile Fusion will allow IT admins to control device-specific functions — such as remote lock and wipe, policy enforcement and application delivery — from one Web-based console, RIM said. The service will rely on BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for BlackBerry management, and it will use software acquired from ubitexx to manage Apple and Android devices, according to The Verge. A closed beta program will begin in January, with general availability scheduled for late March, RIM said.

There are other multi-platform MDM vendors out there, but RIM is in a unique position to capitalize, thanks to its history in the enterprise and existing relationships with BES customers. (That’s if Mobile Fusion can manage iOS and Android as well as BES can manage BlackBerry — which, given most vendors’ history managing other vendors’ stuff, is a big “if.”)

The bigger issue, however, is what this news means for RIM’s core business, enterprise smartphones. RIM isn’t explicitly admitting defeat, but the company knows it’s in trouble. In the press release, RIM said it developed Mobile Fusion in response to “an increase in the diversity of mobile devices in use in the enterprise,” which is the nice way of saying “Apple and Google stealing our market share left and right.”

In light of this admission, diversification is the right move for RIM. But given the company’s recent troubles, it may not be enough.

NFL players love technology. For proof, just check out Chad Ochocinco’s 30,000 tweets or all the athletes who grew up playing as much football on the PlayStation as on the field.

This season, two teams are capitalizing. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Baltimore Ravens have purchased iPads for their players and coaches, and they’ve even built custom apps to store their playbooks and break down film of each week’s games. Players said the iPads make them more productive and invested in their jobs, especially when they’re on the go — which, of course, is the main selling point for the consumerization of IT in more traditional workplaces.

“Back in the day, I think probably the whole team had to sit down with a projector and a reel, and watch the film together,” Buccaneers safety Cody Grimm told the St. Petersburg Times back in August. “Now we all have our own iPad. Stuff that we used to come in here to see, we can sit on our couch at home and have access to it 24-7.”

The Ravens developed their iPad app over the course of a year and worked with Global Apptitude, a Baltimore-based application developer that focuses on building apps for sports teams. With traditional paper playbooks, there is always the risk that a player will lose them and they will fall into opponents’ hands. But the Ravens’ iPad app is password-protected, and the team can wipe each week’s playbook after the game ends.

“I guarantee that all teams are looking how to do this, and a few years from now, everyone is going to have something like this, whether it’s an iPad or some other device,” Nick Fusee, Baltimore’s IT director, told Ravens.com.

What the Bucs and Ravens are doing are great examples of how organizations can embrace (but still control) consumer technology in the workplace. They didn’t just say, “Hey team, here’s an iPad for everybody! Enjoy!” They had an idea, they planned to make sure it would meet their needs, and they decided it would be worth the investment.

So far, it has been — to a point. At 7-3, the Ravens are tied for the best record in the AFC, but the Bucs have lost four games in a row. In football, as in any other job, technology can only take you so far.

By Julia Anderson and Colin Steele, Editors

Apple sold more than 4 million iPhone 4S devices in the three days after its launch, the company reported. AT&T and Sprint also reported record sales on the first day their customers could purchase the iPhone 4S in stores.

More than 25 million devices are now running iOS 5, the latest iPhone, iPod touch and iPad operating system, Apple said. In addition, more than 20 million people have signed up for iCloud, Apple’s new cloud storage service. Both iOS 5 and iCloud debuted just last week.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich debuts

With Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Google is unifying its smartphone and tablet operating systems.

The current smartphone-specific OS is Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and the tablet OS is Android 3.0 Honeycomb. But Android 4.0 is designed to run on both kinds of devices, which should quiet some of the complaints about Android device fragmentation.

Ice Cream Sandwich features a new user interface, with separate home screen tabs for apps and widgets. There’s also improved management of notifications and application-level controls over data usage. And for business users, the OS offers new security and VPN APIs.

Google and Samsung showed off Android 4.0 at a media event in Hong Kong this week. The OS is expected to be available on devices next month.

RIM launches BBX, immediately sued

BBX, the next-generation operating system for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets, debuted at this week’s BlackBerry DevCon Americas conference.

BBX combines the traditional BlackBerry OS with QNX, an operating system Research in Motion (RIM) acquired last year. RIM was short on details about BBX, but the company did say the OS would make it easier to develop richer, more interactive “super apps” for BlackBerry devices.

Talk about potential BBX features was short-lived, however, because the day after the launch, a software company called BASIS filed legal action against RIM over the BBX name. It turns out BASIS has its own operating system called BBx, and RIM’s announcement caused “great confusion” for BASIS users, the company said.

The lukewarm reception to BBX, last week’s BlackBerry outage and the continued success of iOS and Android devices have at least one blogger wondering whether RIM should give up on BlackBerry entirely.

Motorola, Verizon unveil Droid RAZR

The new Droid RAZR will be the world’s thinnest LTE-capable smartphone, Motorola and Verizon Wireless said this week.

Despite its 7.1mm waist line, the latest in Motorola’s line of Android smartphones has a similar look to other Droid models. But it boasts a Kevlar fiber casing designed to “withstand the back-pocket test,” Motorola said.

The Droid RAZR runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and supports Verizon’s 4G LTE network. Motorola has also included support for its MotoCast application, which streams content between PCs and mobile devices. Business users will have access to corporate email, the ability to view and edit Word documents, and Citrix Receiver for remote application access.

Pre-orders for the Droid RAZR start Oct. 27, and it’s scheduled to be available in stores in November.

Photo (cc) by Denise Cross and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

By Bridget Botelho, Senior Site Editor

AUSTIN, Texas — A session here at Dell World on the convergence of endpoint devices turned out to be a support group for administrators dealing with the consumerization of IT and bring-your-own-device policies.

About 100 IT folks weighed the pros and cons of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies and shared their experiences of begrudgingly supporting personal smartphones, iPads and other tablets in addition to corporate-owned PCs.

Part of the problem is that the BYOD concept goes against the ideals of platform standardization in corporations. Tablets are convenient, but they have limitations, so end users can’t ditch their PCs entirely.

“Users can’t use their iPad to run AutoCAD, but they don’t care,” one attendee said. “They still want one. All we can do is be flexible and suggest specs and configurations, but we see the gamut of devices anyway.”

That sense of defeat was palpable in the room. Administrators know that the consumerization of IT is happening, with or without their support.

“You have to support them, because end users are circumventing IT in ways you wouldn’t believe,” another attendee said.

In companies that do let employees use their tablets for work, IT ends up managing multiple platforms per end user, which is obviously not a popular concept among time-strapped administrators.

“We have all of these employees who want iPads, and if we let them use those devices, we end up supporting all these different browsers and applications and wireless environments,” one attendee griped. “These are the same employees who don’t even know what a wireless connection is.”

Other attendees shared stories of end users who they said are too clueless to take responsibility for their own devices — particularly when running corporate applications on them. Many end users don’t know how to ensure a connection is secure, for instance.

One answer to that problem is desktop virtualization, which lets IT remotely deliver a corporate desktop image and also kill that image if a device is stolen, compromised or infected by a virus.

There are plenty of IT shops that support BYOD using desktop virtualization, particularly in higher education, where students bring their own Macs, iPads and Android devices and expect to access university apps and data on those devices anytime, from anywhere.

The corporate world uses that approach as well. One session attendee said her employer gives each employee a $1,200 stipend every three years to buy devices and support from the vendor of his or her choice, so that the company IT department does not have to support those devices. Administrators simply deliver virtual desktops to end users and manage the desktop image on the back end.

Whether that approach to BYOD saves companies money depends, because large companies get client devices at a corporate discount. Desktop virtualization isn’t exactly cheap, either, and there are also some performance limitations with remote desktops that vendors still have to overcome.

But the multi-device movement is happening with or without IT support, so it’s a good idea to investigate some BYOD options. As Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services, said this week, IT has little choice but to embrace the notion of consumerization.

“The always-on, always-available infrastructure is bringing itself to bear in the commercial space,” he said. “CIOs can either fend it off or embrace it and support the availability everywhere, anytime. … It’s innovate or die.”

As the bring-your-own device phenomenon grows, so do the options for separating personal and business communications on the same device.

Desktop virtualization delivers self-contained business operating systems and applications to smartphones and tablets. Technologies such as VMware’s Mobile Virtualization Platform and AT&T’s Toggle let users essentially keep two phones — one for business use, one for personal use — on the same device. And with a new release from ShoreTel, employees can securely tap into their companies’ unified communications (UC) systems from their mobile devices.

“We’re starting to see a lot of interest in companies that want to make the mobile device the primary method of communication,” said analyst Irwin Lazar, a vice president at Nemertes Research.

ShoreTel focuses on mobile unified communications

Announced this week, the latest version of ShoreTel Mobility aims to provide user-friendly mobile unified communications access. An employee downloads an app, which integrates with his or her phone’s existing dialer and contact list, and IT then provisions that device for access to the UC system.

When the employee calls a personal contact, the phone makes the call as usual. But when the employee calls a business contact, ShoreTel Mobility kicks in — automatically connecting to the VPN if outside the corporate firewall — and the user has access to the company’s full UC features.

“It makes it a lot easier to use,” Lazar said. “From a user perspective, it’s just like any other app.”

As with any bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiative, device support is a major factor in whether a new project will succeed or not. ShoreTel Mobility supports 12 Android devices running version 2.1 or higher, Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, plus the latest BlackBerry OS 6 devices.

“Most of our customers used to be focused on the BlackBerry … and as Android and iPhone got more popular, this whole bring-your-own-device phenomenon got its legs and took off,” said Pejman Roshan, ShoreTel’s vice president of mobility.

ShoreTel Mobility also connects to all leading PBX systems in addition to ShoreTel’s, including those from Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Microsoft.

“A lot of [other vendors] have a fairly limited number of mobile devices that they’ll support, and it brings it back into their own portfolio,” said Frank Stinson, partner and senior analyst with Intellicom Analytics. “It’s not supporting the bring-your-own-device thing as well as [ShoreTel].”

The ShoreTel Mobility app does not store any data locally on users’ devices, so IT admins can de-provision employees without wiping out the personal data on their phones — a common complaint among users.

“They can containerize the app, knock out the app, put a poison pill in the app, whatever you want to call it, and not take out the whole device,” Roshan said.

Mobile and desktop virtualization options

ShoreTel Mobility is focused on keeping personal and business phone calls separate, but other approaches pay more attention to data and apps.

VMware and Verizon Wireless will announce this week they are partnering to offer personal and business segregation on smartphones, according to IDG News Service. They will presumably use VMware’s Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), a smartphone hypervisor that allows multiple operating systems to run on the same device — in effect creating isolated environments that users can switch between based on the tasks they need to perform.

Also this week, AT&T announced Toggle, a similar feature based on technology from Enterproid, whose Divide platform lets users create secure enterprise profiles to access on their personal smartphones.

A major problem with VMware MVP and AT&T Toggle is that, as of now, they only run on Android devices, said Mike Sapien, principal analyst with Ovum.

“Multiple platforms, multiple operating systems, multiple devices is a lot more friendly for the users,” he said.

Their go-to-market strategies may also cause issues for IT admins, who are looking to make their jobs easier, not harder, Stinson said.

“ShoreTel’s selling to the enterprise and providing an architecture to support users’ existing devices,” he said. “The carriers are coming at it from the other angle. If they’re contracting with the user, that’s kind of an administrative hassle for the enterprise.”

Desktop virtualization technologies aren’t an ideal solution, either. Reliance on connectivity and the performance of Windows OSes and apps on mobile devices are still obstacles for many organizations. As Bob Egan, managing director of MGI Research, put it at last week’s Interop conference, “Virtualization is a mess right now. … The company that figures out media support and application and OS neutrality is going to be a big company.”

Photo (cc) by Trace Meek and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

A massive BlackBerry outage has left users with limited email and messaging services for much of this week.

The BlackBerry outage began Monday for users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and it spread to North America on Wednesday. Research in Motion (RIM) has blamed the BlackBerry outage on the failure of one of its core networking switches — and the subsequent failure of its backup system.

The BlackBerry outage comes at a terrible time for RIM. Once the only game in town for mobile email, its market share is eroding as consumer devices running Apple iOS and Google Android take hold. RIM still offers the strongest enterprise management capabilities, but that matters less and less, thanks to the consumerization of IT. And its enterprise reputation will definitely take a hit with this extended BlackBerry outage.

Late Wednesday night, RIM said service levels were improving. And today, co-CEO Mike Lazaridis posted this message on YouTube:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/zQ1esvGae_s" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Apple iOS 5 released

The latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 5, hit iTunes on Thursday. The release brings more than 200 new features to the iPhone and iPad, including a drop-down notifications menu, better camera options and Twitter integration that’s laid on real thick.

With iOS 5, Apple is also moving beyond mobile devices into another consumerization area: cloud storage. The new iCloud service stores music, videos, photos and documents and makes them available across your iOS devices, Macs and even PCs. Hey, speaking of cloud storage…

Box.net targets businesses

Cloud storage and collaboration service Box.net has raised $81 million in its latest round of funding, designed to help boost its enterprise offerings.

Box.net and similar services, such as Dropbox, have grown in popularity among people who want to store and access their data and documents — both personal and business — from any device. But this Wild West approach has businesses concerned about security, and now the major IT vendors are swooping in.

Microsoft (Windows Live SkyDrive), Apple (iCloud) and VMware (Project Octopus) are all entering the cloud storage market to address enterprise needs. Box.net, for one, is not backing down.

“Businesses of all sizes are moving their information and collaboration to the cloud, and with this new capital we’ll support their transition by continuing to aggressively out-innovate legacy players like Microsoft,” co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie said in a press release.

Box.net also turned down a $600 million acquisition offer from Citrix Systems earlier this year, according to Forbes. And to combat this week’s debut of iCloud, the company is giving away 50 GB of storage to all iOS users.

NEW YORK — There’s room for a third vendor to succeed alongside Apple and Google in the mobile OS market. Who that vendor will be — Microsoft or RIM — is up for debate.

Analysts discussed the future of the market during an Interop session this morning. Research in Motion (RIM) has dominated in the business world with its BlackBerry smartphones, but its long-term outlook isn’t so rosy, thanks to employees buying iPhones, iPads and Android devices and using them for work.

Even if RIM as a company doesn’t survive this shift, the BlackBerry will still maintain a strong enterprise presence, said Rohit Mehra, director of enterprise communications infrastructure for IDC.

“BlackBerry’s going to be around, in terms of the install base, for a long time,” he said. “Things don’t change that fast in our industry.”

But Mark Lowenstein, managing director of Mobile Ecosystem, said Microsoft is in a better position, thanks to Windows’ huge install base among business users.

“It’s going to be very interesting to see what Microsoft does in this space over the next year,” he said. “They already have multiple hooks in the enterprise.”

Andrew Borg, senior research analyst with the Aberdeen Group, called Microsoft a “force to be reckoned with” because of its Windows Phone OS. The latest version, Mango, features a unique design that will set Microsoft smartphones apart, Borg said.

“They are not imitating iOS,” he said. “There are many that think that Android is a clone of iOS. You can’t argue that with Microsoft.”

Managing heterogeneous environments is a huge pain.

That’s one of the major lessons I learned over three years of covering the virtualization market. Lots of vendors say they can manage mixed infrastructures, but they all have shortcomings. The platform vendors have limited features for managing competing platforms. The small ISVs do a few specific things well, but they don’t do everything. And the big systems management tools can be costly and complicated.

Desktop admins haven’t really had to worry about this problem. Most shops run Windows exclusively, using well-established, Windows-specific tools for management. But that’s all changing.

You may have noticed that Windows PCs aren’t the only enterprise endpoints anymore. These cool little gadgets called smartphones and tablets are infiltrating the workplace. Lots of them. Made by different vendors. Running different OSes. With different levels of security. And if you think you can pick just one to support, you better think again.

That’s according to a recent Forrester Research report, “Ten Lessons Learned From Early Adopters of Mobile Device Management Solutions.” In the report, Forrester analysts warn, “The years of limiting device choice to a single platform are over.”

Does that mean you have to support every device under the sun? No. Just because Kevin the new sales rep thought he was getting a good deal on a BlackBerry PlayBook at Best Buy, you shouldn’t have to bend over backwards to accommodate him.

Forrester recommends focusing on iPhones, iPads and Android devices, which are the most popular among users and mobile device management (MDM) vendors alike. But you’ll still face plenty of challenges, even with this narrow scope, because today’s MDM tools “have limited management functionality,” and “many IT managers still have concerns about the lack of full-disk encryption and more advanced application control,” Forrester says.

With all of these issues, the temptation is strong to just avoid supporting these devices altogether. But that won’t stop employees from using them. And without at least some controls in place, your organization’s security could be at risk. Any way you slice it, the consumerization of IT is bringing the pain of mixed-infrastructure management to endpoint admins.