Mobile Phone Refresh Project

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The things I love about iOS5 – the first 24 hours of playing

iOS5 was released at 6pm GMT yesterday (12th October 2011) – if you haven’t already upgraded your iPhone and iPad, then you should.

If you’re having issues because you’re getting “resource not found” when trying to upgrade to iOS5 or something similar-sounding, then fear not – it’s just apple’s servers being under a bit of strain, you can download the offline copy straight from the web site and then within iTunes simply do a backup and then shift-click “Restore” to browse to the offline file (remember to upgrade iTunes first though).

If you’re in charge of a fleet of iPhones I’d always recommend downloading the package first and then using it again and again on all devices to save time and internet bandwidth. You can either download it once in iTunes and then get it from:

C:\Users\smd\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPad Software Updates C:\Users\smd\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Software Updates

(or the equivalent place on your own system), or you can find out the URL from somewhere else such as this helpful article on osXdaily.
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MDaemon, Airwatch and iPhones

Faced with the task of rolling out iPhones to near-100 users we thought it would be best to investigate some Mobile Device Management (MDM) vendors, trying to keep track of 100 free “find my iPhone” accounts might be achievable, but it certainly wouldn’t be fun.

We fairly quickly decided on Airwatch (http://www.air-watch.com/), relatively new to the market place in terms of MDM but cheap enough that we could give it a go without too much heartache.

At the same time as this MDaemon (our preferred e-mail server software) released an update which supported Exchange ActiveSync (if the word makes you shudder because of flashbacks of crappy PC-based synchronisation problems, fear not, it’s different): this presented us with an opportunity to roll out 100 centrally managed iPhones with vastly improved functionality and easy-of-use when compared to our previous implementation.

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Mobile Phone Refresh: new iPhones and a move to Everything Everywhere

In 2011 the existing mobile phone contract with Vodafone came up for renewal and so, being diligent we decided to evaluate the top three/four mobile phone companies in the UK, Vodafone (again); o2; and Orange (which quickly became Everything Everywhere due to the merger between T-Mobile and Orange).

Our Vodafone contract had been a three-year deal, and our technology fund had expired. We were currently in a situation where a third of our user base had iPhones (some 3GS, some 4) and the rest were still on classic Nokia handsets which were starting to fall apart, consequently we were looking for a deal that satisfied a number of requirements. The issues that we wanted to solve were:

Technology fund empty – we couldn’t get any more iPhones
Data Usage – some users are utilising data despite not having an iPhone causing extra cost (no bundle)
Signal Strength – some rare locations such as basement offices didn’t get signal.
Cumbersome procedures – the method of setting up roaming and adding extra packages to mobile handsets is time consuming and awkward to complete.
Disparate handsets
Online billing system is not ideal

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