One of the most common things that customers always want to talk to me about when adopting Office 365 is how they can take advantage of the mobility but in a secure way and embrace the idea of bring your own device. There are some great tools on the market that can help with this but typically it is pushing up the cost of your Office 365 deployment when the whole point was to save costs!
An announcement was made recently that has now introduced mobile device management for Office 365 with some great capabilities at no extra cost.
Let’s take a look at some of the features that will be released very soon:
- Apply security policies such as require password and device encryption
- Apply mobile device settings such as not allowing jail broken or rooted devices to connect
- Selective wipe of mobiles to ensure that company data is wiped but not personal data
- This works with the native applications on your phone rather than having to deploy another application like other 3rd party solutions force you to do
- Administer this directly from your Office 365 portal, no need for any additional software
This will be available to all types of Office 365 subscriptions and should be available to Office 365 by the start of 2015.
All of these great new features are powered by Intune and if you expand this into a full Intune subscription you can also take advantage of great features such as deploying WiFi and VPN profiles to a mobile device and application management which can block users from copying and pasting from work applications such as Word for mobile into other non-approved applications. For example, if you open a corporate word document on the phone and attempt to copy and paste content into the Twitter app, Intune can stop this and ensure data is protected.
Pretty cool and could potentially open the door for you to offer BYOD or offer big savings my moving your mobile device management to the native Office 365 MDM and enhancing it with an Intune subscriptions.
Cheers
Paul
