Enterprise Mobility Management

Allow and Block Listed Apps With Entgra MDM

Blog, MDM, Tech / By / January 11, 2022 / , ,

Manage device applications by using our latest feature

Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash

Entgra MDM now enables you to allow and block listed apps with the latest feature. Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) admins can manage device applications by using the blacklisting and whitelisting technique.

By way of an example, think of a school or an educational institute that provides tablets to their students for online learning. Admins need to restrict several apps from these devices (such as social media apps) in these scenarios. This means that these apps will be blacklisted whilst other apps, such as educational ones, would be installed in the devices sans interaction with the students.

The app blacklisting and whitelisting feature help you to meet these requirements. App whitelisting means that all applications, except the ones explicitly defined, are blocked. End users can only use apps that have been explicitly defined. App blacklisting occurs when defined applications cannot be installed on target devices. If the given black listed apps are already installed, they will be removed from devices.

The Entgra IoT Platform has an Application Restriction Settings policy with the capability to manage device applications for appropriate users. You can access this policy in the Android policy section on the Entgra IoT Platform. In this feature, you have the ability to select the appropriate app list type. Depending on the type selected, the functionality is as follows:

Allow List

After selecting the allow list you need to add these apps’ names and their package names. When the policy is applied to the device, only the listed app will be available and other apps will disappear.

Block List

Provide the names of the apps and package names that you want to add to the block list. When the policy is applied to the device, only the listed app will be removed and other apps will remain in the device.

In this way, you can change the number of apps on devices according to your preferences.

Let us return to the example. The head of the school or institution can add apps and their package names that he/she wants to block from the devices to the Block list. These listed apps will be removed from the devices while the required apps will remain. On the other hand, if he/she wants to add some educational or learning aid apps to the students’ devices, these can be installed through this policy.

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

Understanding Entgra’s Enterprise Mobility Management Capabilities (Part 2)

Blog, Tech / By / January 11, 2022 / ,

An introduction to our file transfer feature

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

This blog is the second part of a series that deep dives into Entgra’s Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) capabilities. Through this blog series, we aim to 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.

Transfer Your Files and Perform Operations in Local Device Files

Imagine that you are managing a sales team. Your day to day activities involve sending sales reports or any other kind of find to your team members’ mobile phones or tablets. Or perhaps you need to edit files that you have already sent by renaming it or delete unnecessary files stored in a device. These actions can be performed easily when you are in the office.

Now imagine that your sales team is in the field and you want to transfer files to them, transfer files from their device to your server or perform an operation on the file in their device without disturbing them.

Fortunately, there’s a way to perform these actions.

Entgra IoT Server, with its EMM features, provides file transfer features to tackle similar kinds of scenarios. Admins can transfer files from an FTP server to a folder in the user’s device and vice versa using the file transfer feature. It is also possible to remotely access a device’s file system and perform file management tasks such as copy, rename, and delete files. 

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

Using Devices in the Field

Click on the “connect to device” option on each device to start a remote session when using your devices in the field. This will display the device’s files on the screen. Select the option that allows you to select a server, where you can view all preconfigured FTP servers. Then simply click one of the servers, the server files will be fetched and shown on the screen. You can select any file and perform file transfer from local device to the FTP server or vice versa. This also comes with an option to rename and delete the local files in the device also.

The first blog of this series gives you a quick introduction to our remote screen sharing and control features. You can read the blog here. 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.

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

Blog, Tech / By / January 11, 2022 / , ,

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

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

Blog, Tech / By / January 11, 2022 / , , ,

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.