The IT Melting Pot!

Wow! I must say that Bas van Kaam has done a great wrap-up here! I highly recommend you to read this blog post!!! 🙂

It was only about a month ago when I was writing my Blog about the CloudGateway that I wondered which route  Citrix would take now that they acquired Zenprise, well… here it is… XenMobile, another Xen sibling sees the light! Lets jump right in…

I had the opportunity to make use of one of Citrix’s demo environments to have a closer look at MDM, which is an awesome way to explore new and existing products by the way, if your company is a Citrix partner and has access I definitely recommend having a look. Besides that I used the Citrix E-Docs website as well as Citrix.com to find as much information as possible.

The main focus of this article will be on XenMobile MDM as the Mobile Solutions Bundle (one of the two editions available) focuses primarily on the CloudGateway which I already discussed in one of my previous blogs.

MDM?

MDM stand for Mobile Device Management and it’s just that! Here’s what Citrix has to say about it: As per Citrix: XenMobile MDM is a robust mobile device management solution that delivers role-based management, configuration, and security for both corporate and employee-owned devices. Upon user device enrollment, IT can provision policies and apps to devices automatically, blacklist or whitelist apps, detect and protect against jailbroken or rooted devices, and selectively wipe a device that is lost, stolen, or out of compliance. Users can use any device they choose, while IT can ensure compliance of corporate assets and secure corporate content on the device.

Editions

There are two editions: XenMobile MDM and the Mobile Solutions Bundle. XenMobile MDM primarily focuses on (hardware) device management, more on it’s extensive feature set shortly. Every major platform is supported including: iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Microsoft Windows 8. It includes the XenMobile Secure Mobile Gateway (SMG) and XenMobile SharePoint Data Leak Prevention (DLP) as well as the XenMobile Mobile Service Provider (ZSM) and the XenMobile Remote Support Application Toolset.

SMG provides the ability to protect and secure mobile e-mail through MDM policies, it provides fine-grained access control of HTTP ActiveSync requests made by mobile devices against back-end Exchange Client Access Servers (CAS). DLP does the same for SharePoint access on mobile devices, again using MDM policies. It gives IT administrators control over the devices that have access to SharePoint data while Citrix Mobile connect, a native mobile app, provides the interface to securely view documents. The demo environment I used didn’t include the SMG or DLP. I do however have a screenshot on how and where it is configured within the MDM Device Manager as far as the SMG goes.

ZSM Lite is a component that enables access to query Blackberry and ActiveSync environments and provides the device and user information to Device Manager via the XenMobile Mobile Service Provider (ZMSP). ZMSP offers Web Services for Device Manager to query BES users and device and control operations like wipe and lock. The XenMobile Remote Support Application Toolset provides several tools to assist in the inspection, troubleshooting, and modification of remotely controlled handheld devices. The software is installed on a Windows-based computer that allows support personnel to take remote control of the Windows Mobile devices, unfortunately I don’t have any screenshots on Remote Support, I do on ZSM.

To give you an idea on how all these components interact, althoug ZSM and the XenMobile Remote Support Application Toolset aren’t visible, here’s a picture from one of the Citrix Whitepapers I used as reference.

Using a hardware load balancer like Citrix NetScaler in front of all the MDM components makes it more secure, the less components you have in your DMZ the better. This way you could also take advantage of additional NetScaler functions to further increase security. Of course it’s optional, you could totally do without if you like.

The Mobile Solutions Bundle combines MDM…

Continue reading here!

//Richard