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Entgra MDM Now Includes LiveFeed, Enabling Admins to Remotely Track Device Details With Ease

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We’re pleased to introduce LiveFeed, our latest addition to Entgra MDM. Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) admins can now use LiveFeed to troubleshoot issues on devices in real-time and monitor the device performance in a live session.

Photo by Marek Levák on Unsplash

LiveFeed has numerous uses in businesses. For example, imagine that you’re a sales manager and you want to promote an enterprise application or any other application to the sales representatives who are working in different locations. You then install the application, inform your sales representatives, push that particular app to the devices, and check that it’s functioning properly. Some of your colleagues could inform you that they have been unable to install the particular application or you observe an installation failure on some devices by checking the operation log of the server. Imagine trying to install this application repeatedly and it fails.

To provide other examples, sometimes you receive complaints about devices that function at a slow speed with users experiencing performance issues and even random freezing. At times, devices do not synchronize with the server even when they are switched on. In such scenarios, sales managers will not be able to apply any device operation, policy or app installation to any device. Devices that fail to charge properly and the need for devices that charge faster is another issue.

At this point, if you can view the current details of relevant devices, you can easily discover the reasons behind the above failures. In such a scenario, LiveFeed will be of great help to you.

LiveFeed Functionalities

LiveFeed is available under the Remote Session. After connecting to the device, select the tab called “LiveFeed”. It will show the device details fetched from the device. The extracted device details will include:

  • Battery details – The health of the battery, temperature, and charging percentage.
  • Device memory – Internal memory usage and external memory usage of the device are shown separately.
  • RAM usage – RAM usage of the device.
  • WiFi connectivity – WiFi connectivity strength of the device plus daily and hourly WiFi data consumption.
  • Mobile connectivity – Mobile connectivity strength of the device plus daily and hourly mobile data consumption.

All of the above mentioned details are derived from the live data of the device. As such, when a user makes a query about the above scenario we can initialize a remote session of that particular device and open the LiveFeed feature. Following that, we can examine the details derived from the device and perform troubleshooting.

Let’s return to the application installation failure example that we discussed earlier. In this particular example, the reason behind the installation failure is due to the poor WiFi or mobile signal strength of the connected device. Moreover, if the device has limited internal or/and external memory space, this could be another contributing factor. Another factor could even include an error with the device.

When we look at the other examples, the reason behind slow functioning devices is less RAM. A synchronization failure can happen when relevant devices are located in areas with poor mobile or WiFi signal strength. Devices with poor battery health experience charging issues.

There are several underlying causes behind application installation failures. By using LiveFeed, you can remotely identify these factors with ease without having to examine the device physically, thereby saving time and providing customer satisfaction in the process. LiveFeed also enables you to learn about the causes behind above mentioned synchronizing and device charging issues.

You can watch this video to learn more about LiveFeed.

Entgra MDM has extensive enterprise wide MDM features that you can customize for your business needs. Learn more about the product and how we can help here.

You can also get in touch with us via contact@entgra.io

Virtual Classrooms: From Chaos to Collaboration

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Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

As the world continues to battle with the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing is our daily reality and how are teachers and students faring in virtual classrooms?

Not so well, apparently, as attested unanimously by Parents Anonymous.

Most schools in Colombo already have a functioning distance learning system in place and well established mechanisms through which schools communicate with parents and students.

During periods such as these when schools are closed unduly and indefinitely, schools usually take measures to send out SMSs alerting all parents regarding any important news, changes in schedules, and guidelines to follow in times of crisis. Individual class teachers have WhatsApp groups created for the class, informing students about study packs, assignments, exam schedules, and such. Then there is the actual online distance learning system through which the teachers conduct interactive virtual lessons routinely.

This system functions fairly well most of the time with students managing by themselves.

So what’s all this fuss about?

A deeper look into the matter reveals several underlying problems, some of which are so banal that they would not have occurred to your IT administrator.

In one instance, for example, half of the students of Class A had completed an assignment that was meant for the whole Grade. The specific assignment for Class A, however, had been posted on the class WhatsApp group only. The students who worked on the wrong assignment somehow did not have access to that update, mostly because the phones were with their parents while they worked on some other device.

Another common issue encountered with running virtual classrooms is the disparity of devices and platforms used by individual students. The use of a variety devices such laptops, tablets, and smartphones are commonplace in today’s era of digital flexibility.

The Challenges

The main technical challenge posed here arises when integrating into existing or implementing new systems with the complexity of various disparate operating systems, hardware, software, and network requirements. The different devices and platforms for communication used by students also have to be taken into consideration as well.

A centrally administered platform, with precise User Profile Management can easily address the issues above.

The varying degrees of computer literacy among students, teachers, and parents using the system have to be taken into consideration as well. This plays an important role in deciding on a solution that works equally well for the not so tech-savvy.

The Benefits

The benefits of smoothly operating virtual classes far surpasses the concerns outlined above. This is going to be the trend in the future, so the focus at hand should be on ironing out the hindrances and adapting to the future and beyond.

Virtual classrooms are aimed at providing a fun, interactive learning experience that encourages students to individually explore, share knowledge, and learn through collaborative experiences.

Similarly, the age of digital pedagogy presents a novel teaching experience to tutors too when the right mix of trending technological techniques are employed.

The figure below summarizes how students, teachers, and parents can benefit from virtual classrooms.

Figure 1 — Empowered classroom collaboration with Entgra

How Entgra’s Solutions Can Help

Applying the right technology and using optimal solutions that cater to your specific requirements enable you to tap into the convenience and effectiveness of digitalization.

The right kind of implementation would allow students to explore without restricting their freedom of access to knowledge, and with right protection from misuse and abuse on the internet. Moreover, such potential need not be hindered by concerns of security and adverse accessibility to a plethora of unwarranted information for the students.

Entgra’s Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions for empowering classroom collaboration offers just that, tailored to the specific requirements of an educational institute.

Given below is what we are capable of in a snapshot:

Figure 2 — MDM solutions by Entgra for education

With over hundreds of companies around the globe already empowered by our enterprise-grade solutions, your virtual classroom problems are safely dealt with by our team. Built on extensible plug-in architecture and enhanced by world-class engineering expertise, the Entgra IoT Server is capable of empowering the best MDM services available today. Get in touch with us via contact@entgra.io and learn more about us here.

Understanding Entgra’s Enterprise Mobility Management Capabilities (Part 1)

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A quick overview of our remote screen sharing and control features

Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

This blog is the first in an ongoing series that takes a look at the Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) offered by Entgra. These blogs will provide a better understanding of how Entgra’s technology can help you manage and secure your devices, improve the performance of your employees, and increase business profits through seamless device management.

Show Me Your Screen

Imagine that your neighbor wants to work as a driver for Uber. Yet after registering with Uber, he encounters strange errors when logging into the app. Luckily for him, you are a support engineer at Uber. Your neighbor comes over and shows this problem to you. With a few clicks here and there,  you fix the problem for your friend and now he uses the app happily. 

Now imagine that a customer is experiencing an issue in another country. You cannot identify this issue over a call and you need to see what exactly the customer is doing to understand the problem. Unfortunately for you, the customer is not your neighbor to make both of your lives simpler.

But there’s a way around this problem. 

Entgra IoT Server, with its EMM features, provides remote screen sharing and control capabilities to tackle similar enterprise scenarios. If you have a set of field devices with a mission critical application on a set of enterprise owned mobile devices, you may want to know where these devices are and remotely troubleshoot in case there are issues that are hard to fix. Clear the app data and cache, reboot, reinstall the app, examine files from the app and in some cases, you may need to wipe the device to fix the problem. Your options here are to buy a very expensive remote control solution and install it on all devices or get a solution such as Entgra’s with remote control capabilities. 

Here’s a short video that illustrates how simple remote and access is: 

Under the Hood

When your devices are used in the field, you may initialize a remote session by clicking on the “connect to device” option on individual devices. This starts a web socket connection with the device and streams the device’s screen as a live feed. On top of this, we have written a custom keyboard that sends keyboard inputs to the device and types them in when needed. The mouse inputs are also sent in a similar manner which translates to click, drags or presses as commanded. The bottom line is that you have access to a complete remote login system via Entgra to manage and troubleshoot your field devices.

In our next blog, we’ll be taking a look at how you can work with files. You can learn more about our IoT, EMM, and Mobile Device Management (MDM) technology here. We’re always happy to hear from you, so drop us an email on contact@entgra.io to start a conversation with us.

Unified Endpoint Management of APIs for Enterprise Devices

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Complete enterprise device management solutions

Photo by Blake Connally on Unsplash

Enterprise Devices — Leading the Way

In a world driven by smart technology¹ that seeks to reap the maximum benefits from recent advancements as soon as possible, one can do little to not be left behind. This is twice as much important if you’re a thriving global enterprise or aspiring to be one. Keeping abreast requires all of your ingenuity.

Enterprises today are increasingly adopting various types of disparate devices into their everyday business operations. Some of these are standard legacy mobile devices like tablets, smartphones, and laptops. Then there are Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as sensors, PLCs², communication gateways, edge computing devices, CCTV cameras, etc. that are also heavily used to monitor and control all aspects of business and supply chains.

Technical challenges arise after these devices are employed. Enterprises need to change business processes to communicate with them seamlessly while adhering to enterprise application development paradigms. This is when a unified set of API endpoints (UEMs) that represent the complete enterprise device deployment becomes a game changer.

Recent Trends in Enterprise Device Adoption

Let’s start with a broader perspective on device dependency. Statistics reveal that the number of mobile phone users far outnumber those with access to electricity, or even running water.

Source: https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?articleId=1741352

This means that a startling 69% of the world’s population has access to mobile phones.

Other recent surveys on enterprise device adoption reveal a steady increase in the use of active connections worldwide, with IoT device usage increasing faster compared to traditional device usage.

Source: https://www.comparitech.com/internet-providers/iot-statistics/

Enterprise Devices That Give Us a Sixth Sense

Enterprises are adopting connected devices for a real-time understanding of ground level conditions, adding an element of sixth sense in business processes across supply, production, and consumption chains. Various types of devices, sensors, PLCs, communication gateways, edge computing devices, etc. are employed to ensure process efficiency. Moreover, this boom in device usage has been accompanied by a significant reduction in the cost of deploying devices in recent times.

In keeping with the latest trends, data communication and infrastructure have also drastically improved with plenty of software platforms enabling connections between different devices for application development or business process enhancements.

Explosion in Device Adoption

All these developments have led to an explosion of disparate device end points coming into the picture, bringing about a new set of challenges for enterprises. As a result, we now have a number of device endpoints within an enterprise that require monitoring, managing, and specified permissions for access within the framework, calling for effective device onboarding and managing strategies.

Challenges in Enterprise Device Management

However, this also means that enterprises are now dependent on these device endpoints to execute some form of business functionality, or to receive feedback on business processes.

This brings us to the fundamental problem of tackling the challenges posed by enterprise device management. Typically, one of the following illustrated deployment architecture patterns handle device deployment:

Some important points considered by these deployments include:

  • Heterogeneous deployment architectures
  • Expansion of corporate (traditional) network boundaries
  • Network connectivity
  • Device functional accuracy determination
  • Rogue device detection
  • Identity and access management (device identity/ human operator identity)
  • Establishment of authorized access for device data/control
  • Firmware distribution and different device OS platforms
  • Asset tracking at manufacturing, QC, distribution, and installation phases
  • Heterogenous development architecture
  • Typical “difficult” devices placements such as remote locations, manholes, tunnels, etc.
  • Complicated wiring architecture
  • Communication modules

Integration Challenges in the Lifecycle of an Enterprise Device

Identifying and addressing integration problems during the various phases of a device’s lifecycle requires considerable effort as indicated by the diagram below:

Consequently, each stage in the lifestyle has its own set of integration requirements as outlined below:

Device Manufacturing Phase

  • Serial ID/ MAC address registration
  • Provisioning token/ certificate generation
  • Firmware burning to ROM

Quality Control / Checks

  • Temporary activation of provisioning token
  • Test operations/ controls
  • Wipe-offs/ factory reset

Ready for Sale / Warehouse

Sold to Customer

Delivered to Installation Site

Installation and Verification

  • Issuing temporary tickets for testing
  • Customer/ site assignment
  • Device activation (token/ digital twin)
  • Warranty activation

In-Production 

  • Device communication with IoT platform
  • IoT platform communication with device
  • Application <-> device interfaces
  • Token authorizations
  • Firmware management

Faulty / Maintenance/ Rogue

  • Device event processing and modeling
  • Deactivation requests
  • Service records/ maintenance mode switch

Device Discarded

Entgra’s Device Integration Platform

The Entgra IoT platform acts as a single platform where you can connect devices from different vendors, enabling you to build applications on top of these devices in a unified way. Given below is a high level view of our IoT platform architecture:

Our device integration platform has the added advantage of sharing the same common architecture, and therefore the same code base, as that of WSO2 technology.

Device integration with Entgra

On top of this IoT platform, we have also have built a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution that specifically targets managing traditional mobile devices such as kiosks and laptops, available as an off-the-shelf product.

Entgra Mobile Device Manager

The Entgra IoT Platform, therefore, offers a standardized set of APIs for simpler enterprise device onboarding, working equally well for standard mobile devices traditionally managed through MDMs as well as for IoT devices.

Your Enterprise Device Journey

This blog provides an overview of how you can manage different types of devices as standard API endpoints within your enterprise architecture to seamlessly onboard different types of devices into your business. Get in touch with us via contact@entgra.io to learn more about our IoT and MDM technologies.

References