The IT Melting Pot!

In this 3rd part of my 7 part series on XenMobile MDM 8.5 we will focus on policies. Policies within MDM allow you to control a multitude of features on your end users mobile devices, including: WiFi, Email, VPN, Location Services, most all functionality of the device (camera, FaceTime, etc), AppStore access, etc. Most configuration variations you do to control and limit/restrict/configure your end users devices will be done from this tab. This tab is also the location where we can create some automated actions that include notifying your users when they have fallen out of compliance.

If you would like to read the other parts in this article series please go to:

• How To: XenMobile MDM 8.5 Deployment Part 1: Installation
• How To: XenMobile MDM 8.5 Deployment Part 2: Basic Configuration

In this article I was to cover a “base” set of policy configurations that will give you a feel of how the policies work in general. By no means does this cover the breadth of what you can do with MDM, but it at least gives you a glimpse.

I want to accomplish the following in this article:

1. Set a passcode policy on the device
2. Block iCloud from syncing documents
3. Preconfigure a WiFi network on my device (so that your users could come into the office with WiFi already configured and never have been given the password)
4. Blacklist Dropbox, Box, and SkyDrive applications
5. Notify the user their device as Out of Compliance (OoC) if those apps are installed
6. Mark the device as OoC in the dashboard

Later in this series we will build upon the policies by adding applications to push to our users and ultimately roll it all together in a Deployment. For the purposes of this article (and the fact I’m a die hard Apple fan) the only devices I own are Apple..so this will all be iOS based. If your Android, first off I’m sorry, and second off it should still be similar  .

Configure a Passcode Policy