Safari Punch-out (And A Possible Solution!) with Web Applications in MobileIron 7.0.3

So about 4 hours after an enthusiastic post welcoming it I'm back to report the first (major) issue. Unfortunately it's a bit of a showstopper.

When you deploy a web application via MobileIron rather than opening that web application in Safari it instead opens the application in a browser of MobileIrons own making. For 90% of things this isn't an issue and the screen layout, not having a tonne of tabs visible, shortcuts, menu bar, etc is certainly a visual improvement that the somewhat cluttered view you get in Apps@Work which uses Safari.

This screenshot from within the MobileIron browser looking at the html5test.com website shows that it's basically wrapping Safari;

This is the same number Safari (iOS) scored when I ran the test. You'll notice how clean the top of the image is - maximum space for the web application.

However the issue is that as it's not Safari it's possible that links within the Web Apps will punch out into Safari when the users touch them. Where the system requires a login they will then have to authenticate again.

It's not easy to create a link which punches out ... I would suspect 99% of links will be unaffected. However when the users hit that 1% the effect - to say the least - is jarring.

So how do you solve this? Well the bad news is there is no real solution other than re-writing your application. We do, however, have a workaround: why not just punch out to Safari at the beginning?

Here's the code you'll need to host on a website to punch out (both in the body of a HTML page);

(div id="foz" data-href="http://www.google.com">

(script>
document.getElementById("foz").addEventListener("click", function(evt) {
    var a = document.createElement('a');
    a.setAttribute("href", this.getAttribute("data-href"));
    a.setAttribute("target", "_blank");

    var dispatch = document.createEvent("HTMLEvents");
    dispatch.initEvent("click", true, true);
    a.dispatchEvent(dispatch);
}, false);
(/script>

You'll need to replace ( with the proper bracket - I can't get Blogger to render the tags!

This code comes courtesy of stackoverflow.com (follow the link).

I tried a large number of ways to punch out from the MobileIron app and this was the first one I found that worked. There might be others but I tried all the common ones I could think of/ find!

Deploying A Web Application Using MobileIron 7.0.3

A fairly simple post to highlight how incredibly easy MobileIron have made it to deploy a web application with their latest update to the server.

The first step is to login as a user with permissions to add application;

Click on the "APPS" tab, then click on "App Distribution Library".

A drop down will then appear showing the available platforms for applications (in Alphabetical order, usually Android first). Using the drop down select "Web Application";

Click on the "Add App" button to bring up the popup window;

Now you can enter the details for your application. The most important point (obviously!) is the "App URL".

You can then pick your categories and whether or not the app appears in the store front - just as you do with other applications.

Unfortunately (in this version) what you can't do is choose the web browser that opens the application (for example Chrome) or apply a per-application VPN (which would just be incredibly useful!). And, while you can select a Windows 8 (note 8, not 8.1 - which I can't test) label it does not appear to rollout the application to the device which is a little frustrating.

On the device itself the application appears as a touchable icon to launch (in exactly the same way as other applications).

I'm sure you'll agree an incredibly useful new feature!

Poor Design: Apple "New Episode Available For Download" Emails

So this is the first of a new series I'm going to start which is centred on instances of less-than-ideal design. Not always bad, just less than ideal (or poor) design.

This example is just like when someone sends you an email saying they've got a message for you. It would have been just as hard to send you an email giving you the actual message but they want you to do something first ... An unnecessary step.

Here's the example from Apple;

What I find infuriating about this is that it doesn't tell me what the new episode *is*. Is it an actual new episode or is it another "making of" documentary of some description? The only way to know is to take a look in iTunes or on the Apple TV.

There's plenty of space. Why not include it?

What adds to the frustrating is that I've been an Apple customer for quite a while and I could have sworn they used to. A little digging around in Gmail (thanks Google!) unearthed this old emails from 2012;

This just makes it more annoying. Apple "Series Pass Notifications" used to include this information.  I wonder what made them stop?

Either way they've taken a once fairly useful email and turned it, not into something useless, but into something of less use for no discernible reason.

Email Etiquette (Or 10 Tips For Better Email)

One of my many hats is that of a Governor to a local Primary School and we just reviewed and updated our "Acceptable Use Policy" for IT part of which was an "Email Etiquette" guide. I thought this part would be useful to a wider audience so I've generalised it and used it below.

1. Know Your Audience
Your e-mail greeting and sign-off should be consistent with the level of respect and formality of the person you're communicating with. Write your emails for the person who will be reading it – if they tend to be very polite and formal, write in that language. The same goes for a receiver who tends to be more informal and relaxed.

If you don't know your audience then it's better to go with the formal approach and let their own responses dictate your approach for future emails. A person expecting an informal email is less likely to be offended by a formal email that a person expecting a formal email is likely to be offended by an email which starts "Yo ..."!

2. Emotions Don't Translate Well
Happiness, anger, etc are very difficult to communicate in an email and are also open to wide interpretation. For example "That's great" - does that mean well done for good work or was that sarcasm?

This goes both ways. Don't assume something you've read and taken personally was intended that way. Pick up the phone, drop by the desk (if possible) and talk to the person. If something is not clear seek clarification - don't jump to conclusions. Cultural background, experience with email, as well as just how busy/rushed that person was at the time! can all feature in an email.

3. Respond In A Timely Fashion 
If the email requires a simple acknowledgement (such as "Yes, I understand", or "See you then") then respond quickly, for emails which require a more detailed response then 2 or 3 days might be okay,  if an email requires a response then longer than that might cause people to think that their email has been missed or ignored (just dropping the sender back an email saying "I've received your email, I'll have the report for you end of next week" - can help with larger tasks).

4. Be Clear In Your Subject Line 
With inboxes being clogged by hundreds of e-mails a day, it's crucial that your subject line gets to the point. It should be reasonably simple and descriptive of what you have written about.

Never open an old e-mail, hit Reply, and send a message that has nothing to do with the previous one. Do not hesitate to change the subject as soon as the thread or content of the e-mail chain changes.

5. Email Attachments
Attachments included in emails should be appropriate to the email message, have meaningful names, and where appropriate use a file format that the recipient(s) are likely able to open (i.e. PDF rather than Word or Excel).

If you're sending a lot of attachments then you might have to split your message up - if that's necessary then try and add something that gives the user an idea how many emails to expect so they know they've got everything (for example "Email 1 of 3 ...").

6. Be Careful With Confidential Information
You are responsible for your own emails. If you need to put confidential information into an email you need to ensure that the recipients are aware that the information is confidential and that they shouldn't then forward it on to other people.

One way to do this is to add "** CONFIDENTIAL **" to the start (not the end) of the email subject.

7. Know When To Stop
Sometimes emails will go back and forth as each recipients attempts to "clarify" something - if you spot this it's best to pick up the phone and have a quick call to clear up any confusion rather than continuing with back-and-forth emails!

8. Keep It Short And To The Point
Like this.

9. Include An Email Signature
Outlook (and many other email programs) will let you specify an email signature that is automatically attached to all of your emails. This is a very useful feature for including thinking the like the company you work for and your contact details (phone number, website, etc). If you keep this up to date then it works really well.

Outlook will also let you have a different signature when you reply to an email than if you just created a new one - this is useful as it can be much shorter (Name, Mobile number) and won't clog up the conversation with lots of unnecessary detail.

10. Ready To Send?
Always spell check your message (and subject) before sending. Take time to send your messages to the right people (To), people who are interested but aren't required to response are copied in (CC) and people who you want to read the email message but who need to be invisible to other recipients are on the BCC list.

Beware of the "reply all", ask yourself if all the recipients need the information in your message. If they don't, why send it, and if they do should they be included in the reply or forwarded a separate copy.

If your email is high or low priority, remember to set the appropriate flag but overuse of the high priority might lead to people ignoring it.


So that's it. 10 (simple?) points for better email. The key point though for documents like this is to keep them updated and make sure the users, the people who will be following it, have a means of contributing into the next version.

Your e-mail is a reflection of you, in some cases this might even be the first impression someone has of you, with a few simple tricks and attention to detail you can appear professional and get across the message you have to convey.

MobileIron: Changing Country-Specific Blocking

MobileIron allows you to designate "active" and "inactive" countries. Once you have designated a Country as inactive all attempts to setup devices in that country will be blocked with the user receiving a "Unable to Connect to the Server" error message like the one below in iOS;

To make changes to the country lists log into the MobileIron admin portal;

Click on the "Settings" page at the top and then scroll down to the registration preferences section;

In this section you have the list of Disabled and Enabled Countries. To change the configuration just select the country in which box and click the appropriate arrow to move it between the boxes.

Once you've made the changes click on the "Save" button at the very bottom of the page.

Windows Phone 8: Email Application Comments

So I've been drafting another post (for about two months now!) in relation to my experiences as an iPhone/ iPad user using a Windows 8 phone as part of a trial. I thought I'd separate this one out into a separate post because it was the biggest surprise.

So let's start with a screen capture (on the right). I've highlighted four things about this absolutely terrible design that are just unforgivably bad;
1. The numbers I've added to this image are in Helvetiva 96-point font and you'll notice it's still slightly smaller than the font size Microsoft have chosen to use for the header text (all, unread, ...). This is just a massive waste of space. Massive. In fact of the 1280 pixel height of the screen 285 pixels, a whopping 22% of the entire screen real estate in the mail application - rather than displaying mail messages - is displaying the header.
2. I've masked part of the email but the next thing to highlight is that the emails are organised by Sender. That's the most important part (according to the designers); the size of the text is 56 point (measuring pixels, probably slightly higher font) so it's *really* important. More important than the subject (see 3). To me, and I suspect most other people, the most important thing in an email message is the subject.
3. Two points about this. The first is that the subject and first line of the email message are differentiated by only a very slight lightening of the font. A long subject doesn't wrap, instead it truncates (you can, for example see that this is a press release but not what it pertains to). The second is that the size of the preview for the text message is a single line. Now I accept that you can change a lot of this in the settings - but should you really have to?
4. The final point, 768 x 1280 screen and FIVE lines from FIVE email messages being displayed. And if you look at the lines you get between 7 and 9 words. You'd get more of your actual content on a blackberry (is there a more damming comparison than that?).

To me this looks like a triumph of appearance over usability. At first glance this looks perfectly good, but a few days in the true terribleness of the design creeps up on you like an unwanted ninja. It can take weeks (especially if you happen to be going for the "zero inbox" like me) but that unwanted ninja will get you in the end. Eventually you'll be looking at your phone in disgust wondering what happened to your massive screen!

To me this sums up one of the fundamental problems with this OS. It's been designed for tiny screens and if you have a larger screen it just scales up; making everything bigger while adding no new content. 96-point font for the heading? That's just madness. 768 x 1280 screen showing just FIVE lines from FIVE mail messages. Just to be clear that's 43 words. 43 useful words in a screen this size. Who thought that made sense?!

Overall I have to say though that it's not a terrible device; the camera is excellent (I'm using Nokia 925) and some of the Nokia apps are good (particularly the Music app). One thing for sure though; it *will* get better. I'm sure when 8.1 appears in a few months time there will be significant improvements. Hopefully the Mail application will be a focus for improvement! Microsoft have designed a really good interface for a phone - good (not iOS-good, but still pretty functional) - the problem is that most people don't want just a phone, in fact people are spending less and less time making calls and more and more time using data*.

So, in conclusion; stuck at the dawn of the Millennium? Have a voice-only contract? Get by on zero-MB data plans? Have no more than 10 emails in your inbox at any one time? This is the phone (more specifically the mail app) for you!

Looking forward to 8.1 ...

*- Is this really news to anyone? I mean it was true when I worked at Vodafone 15 years ago and I certainly can't believe it's less true now than it was back in the heady pre-millennium days of WAP phones and bargain-priced 10p text messages!

Getting The Most Out Of Your Organisations Help desk/ Service Desk

This is intended to be a short article on "Getting The Most Out Of Your Service Desk". It's intended for end-users as a not-entirely-too-serious guide to making your companies service desk work for you. This first section is for when you've got an issue;

• Tell us! We can't fix every single issue everyone raises but we can guarantee that we will fix 0% of the issues no-one raises. Most Help Desks have a knowledge base somewhere attached to them, if anyone has *ever* had your issue before then a solution could be just a click away.
• What's up? Report the problem in enough detail for the person at the other end of the line to understand what you are doing and what bit of it isn't working as you'd expect. Try not to use the phrase "it's not working" - we actually know that, it's not a social call - what we need to know is specifically what isn't working. It's the difference between reporting "I can't send email" and "When I try and check for email in Outlook I get the error 'cannot connect to xxxx'".
• How important is this? It might come as a surprise to you but your IT Department doesn't know your job as well as you do (despite what some of them may think). Reporting the issue "My modems not working" will be treated a lot less seriously than "The modem we use to send purchase orders to our suppliers is not working and we have a 100k order we desperately need to send".
• How many people are affected? If you're reporting a problem that's just affecting you then fine, but if you are reporting a problem on behalf of your team/ floor/ building/ etc. then it's vitally important you say so. When combined with the information you've given above it will be used to determine how important the call is depending on whatever else the help desk is dealing with at the time.
• Be honest! When asked what you were doing when whatever it was happened don't say "nothing". It's not an accusation, we're not trying to catch you out, we're just trying to fix the problem and it's a whole lot easier if we understand how it broke in the first place. For example we had a report of "My laptop has stopped working" from a remote worker and after trying lots of different things we couriered them a new one and picked the old one up. It arrived back in the office with a clear car tyre track on it. Everyone is human, accidents happen, but nothing puts peoples backs up like spending 30 minutes trying to track down a problem with a laptop with someone who knows exactly what is up with it and just doesn't want to admit it.
• Use the facilities. If your help desk has a self service option then please use it and resist the temptation to "just give them a call". Equally if it's not urgent then maybe you can report something via email rather than getting on the phone.
• Solved it yourself? Then close the call (drop help desk an email), nothing is more frustrating than calling someone to let me know you're looking at the problem just to be told that it doesn't matter any more as they've solved it.
• We fixed it? Thank us. Seriously. An email to a Help desk manager saying that you'd like to thank X for dealing so professionally with your issue goes down very well. Reward good service, some day you may need a really big favour and being seen as a "good customer" could be the clincher as to whether or not you get it.
• Lack of a Solution is not always Lack of Progress! Be tolerant, some problems can prove to be unexpectedly complex or have a solution that requires non-IT things (like budgets) that can't be done quickly. So long as you are being kept informed and feel the issue is progressing don't feel you have to escalate something just because a deadline has passed (there are other reasons to escalate, but don't think there is an artificial timetable).

So that's the first stage, if you follow all those steps (other than running over your laptop with a car) then your IT department will love you - well as much as an anonymous voice down the end of the phone can! Now here's the "what's in it for you" bit;

• Always ask for when they will get back to you. Always. There is a huge temptation if you are living and dying by your help desk metrics to "get people off the phone as quickly as possible". As soon as the call is logged you can get the priority and this will tell you when they should get back to you.
• Chase calls that are important. Don't be afraid to chase calls, given that you know when someone should have got back to you (see above) if no-one has contacted you and you are still experiencing the issue let Help desk know. 
• If a call has dragged on for quite some time don't be afraid to ask for it to be escalated! You can escalate a call in two ways; you can call the help desk and ask for it to be escalated, or you can ask your immediate manager to call and chase the call. Both should work equally well.

And that's it. Make sense? No? Yes?