Learnings while building Mobile Device Management [MDM]

The presentation I gave DroidCon India '15 about building device management and our experiences/learnings with the same.

1. By @leenasn at #droidconIN2015
LEARNINGS FROM
Building MDM Solutions

2. MDM
Mobile Device Management
This talk is about MDM i.e. Mobile device management.

3. MDM
Mobile Device Management
Before I start, just to get an idea about you all about how many of you are
Familiar, Used or Built MDM solutions?
It looks like many of some are already aware of MDM and few have worked on the same. Anyways let me quickly give an overview of the same.

4. Centrally Managing Mobile Devices
MDM, Mobile device management, means the ability to manage devices from a centralised location.

5. Since we aren’t Tank or Neo…

6. We need something a little
simpler
A centralised management system which are simpler to manage

7. Enterprise MobilityDevices for Field StaffInformation Kiosk
Enterprise Mobility Management is how it became popular
Now being used for managing:
- Devices for Field Staff
- Devices used as Information Kiosk such as POS systems

8. BYOD
Bring your own Device, employees using owned device for official purposes

9. WHAT IS MDM ?
BYOD
All android logos and manufacture logosBYOD
Fragmented nature of Android makes BYOD complex

10. Available Solutions
MobileIron
Citrix XenMobile
EMM
-Air watch
-MobileIron
-Appertain
-Dell EMM
-Citrix XenMobile

11. Our Story

12. Sabarkantha
District in Gujarat
Sabarkantha is a District in Gujarat. Famous for Wifi Connected villages.

13. Healthcare workers are using devices
to deliver welfare programs
The managed devices are being used across Govt. departments, especially by the health officers in the district for data collection

14. Scheduling Immunisation
vaccinations for children and womenDelivering Education
Malnutrition & importance of immunisation
Collecting Data
Health of rural women, and children Tracking Progress
On rural development work
-Collecting data about the health of rural women, and children
-Providing educative content to increase the awareness of the villagers about:
-malnutrition
-importance of immunisation
-Scheduling vaccinations for children and women
-Inspecting the rural development work
With devices being used for Data collection, the officers have completely stopped using registers and this enables centralised data for any individual in the village.

15. Challenges
•Keeping the apps upto date
•Push content to the devices
•Tracking devices

16. Build Vs Buy?
Issue with going with the enterprise
solutions:
•Hard to customise
•High cost of maintenance as an expert is
needed
•Won’t need 80% of the features
•On-time support is hard

17. Do we Open Source?
I work for a consulting company Multunus, and Mr. Nagarajan, the IAS officer and the district development officer @ Sabarkantha, approached us to build a custom
solution for them. We’ve been approached by other customers too with similar requirement, so we decided to create an open source solution which would help many in
the future who is looking for a barebones MDM solution.

18. OneMDM
•Device Tracking
•Manage Apps in the device
The backend is built with Ruby on Rails with GCM for push. The features include:
-Device Tracking
-Manage Apps in the device
Its in the process of deployment across multiple villages now, and expecting it to solve the problem of “Device Tracking” in the coming few weeks or so.
The plan is to later extend it to other districts and other states across India.

19. Yet Another Story

20. Information Kiosks at clinics
This is about a media company who installs tablets delivering educational media for clinics across US being watched by the patients who visits those clinic. You might
have seen TVs being showing informative content to the patients, and this company experimented with tablets so that people can take those tablets and watch them
replay them and get the shareable URL so that they can watch it later.

21. Challenges
•App to be run in Kiosk mode
•App updates
•Content management
•Remotely configure the sleep time
and off hours
The challenges are:
-Managing the content and the related apps remotely
-Making sure that the app runs all the time
-Keeping the device screen on/off depending upon the working hours of the clinic

22. Challenges
•Playing Adobe Flash Videos
An interesting requirement i.e. running Adobe Flash videos.
Adobe had removed Flash App from playstore then.
Tried to convert these videos to HTML5 videos, but hit with bottlenecks with animations and annotations.
Hard to expect the companies to deliver them in alternate format as most of the advertising companies depend on Adobe Flash for distributing videos.

23. Custom ROM & System
Apps
To ease the process of device onboarding, we decided to go with Custom ROM, which also helped us:
-Pre-installing required apps on the device
-Remove the bloatwares from device
-Configure device settings, voice, lock screen timeout etc.
-Faster OS updates
-Install apps as System apps

24. Risks with Custom ROM
•Voiding the manufacturer's
warranty
•Possibility of bricking the device if
something is goofed up while
rooting
Custom ROM comes with the risk of:
-Voiding the manufacturer's warranty
-Possibility of bricking the device if something is goofed up while rooting

25. Devices used by Field StaffDevices as Information Kiosk
What did we cover about MDM?
&

26. Security
•Device Management API
•Android for Work
Device Management API supports
-Enabling password policies,
-storage encryption
-Disabling camera based on context or time
-The user must explicitly enable the application for the policies to be enforced.
Android for Work by Google
-New player in this game.
-To help the Google App Customers for Device management and administration with BYOD support.
-Based on User Profiles feature Lollipop has introduced.
-At its early stages and can be available only on request basis.
-Something to watch out for

27. Learnings
•Barebones solution can be built using Android API
and a push technology [GCM]
•Importance of Smooth Enrollment process
•Continuous Delivery Practices
•Importance of monitoring and alerting system

28. Contributions welcome
multunus.github.io/onemdm-server/

29. LEENA SN
Head of Engineering @multunus multunus
@leenasn [email protected]

30. References
•Our blog on MDM

http://www.multunus.com/blog/category/mobile-device-
management/
•Read more about Sabarkantha

http://sabarkanthadp.gujarat.gov.in/sabarkantha/english/
•The OneMDM Open source Project

http://multunus.github.io/onemdm-server