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Turbocharging SharePoint on Any Mobile Device

Ever used Microsoft SharePoint on a mobile device? What was that experience like? We’re guessing most users will say its performance was, well let’s just say ”suboptimal”. That’s being quite generous!

Here’s a typical workflow when using SharePoint on a smartphone or tablet today:

Begin by establishing a VPN connection.

Next launch your SharePoint application, either the native application or a web application. Before viewing even a single page of any document, you will need to download the entire document over your VPN-secured wireless connection. On slower connections this can take quite awhile. Next you must launch a mobile office productivity app such as Quickoffice to even view the document. Edits must be completed in Quickoffice, but then must be emailed or saved back to SharePoint. Along the way, Quickoffice often does destructive changes to the document, putting mobile workers like you pretty much at the mercy of these editors if you want to remain productive from the road. If you want to print the document, too bad. Mobile users of SharePoint are pretty much out of luck. You’ll need to email it to yourself, access it on your laptop or desktop, and then finally print it.

This creates some serious limitations. Just to re-iterate the issues:

The performance is downright awful. Downloading an 8MB presentation over a 3G/4G connection using VPN is like sucking cement through a straw. Better keep your fingers crossed that your VPN doesn’t get disconnected midway through, or else you have to start the whole process again, including that 8-10 second delay re-establishing a VPN connection over low bandwidth connections. The moment you use another application like Quickoffice to view or edit the document, your IT administrator has lost visibility and control of the document. Whoops, you may have just violated your company’s compliance or mobile security policies. Not being able to print and sign the document can cause serious delays in your productivity. Downloading malicious documents (heaven forbid) can result in your device being infected with malware. This has the potential to cause irreparable damage to both corporate and personal content on your device.

Contrast this typical SharePoint mobile experience with Armor5 (see the screenshot):

Connect to your company’s remote access portal using any browser. If you are coming over a flaky network connection, don’t worry. Your virtual session is on solid ground in the Armor5 cloud. You’ll benefit from a wired VPN connection back to your corporate data center. The connection will be there waiting for you to instantly reconnect in the event of a network disruption. Click on the SharePoint homepage icon for instant access to your SharePoint server. View SharePoint documents right within your browser. You don’t need to download the entire document. Our cloud-based document converter allows you to view pages of your document within a fraction of a second. Edit documents right in your browser using Microsoft-provided editors, maintaining 100% format fidelity. Save documents straight back to the source, without the need to download or upload documents. Only the incremental changes you make need to be uploaded back from your device. Print from your browser. Yes, you can print straight from your Android, iPad, Blackberry or Kindle device! You can print to the printer next to you, or send it to your printer at home while sitting at Starbucks. Thanks to Armor5′s Google Cloud Print integration, this is all under your control, and visible to your IT administrator.

Armor5 provides high performance, secure SharePoint access, allowing IT to maintain complete control all the time. Of course this same functionality is available when you use any enterprise application through Armor5 – be it SAP or your Intranet portal.

Go ahead and turbocharge your enterprise applications and try Armor5 for free today.

#Cloud mobile security

BYOD policy bites vacationing CEO

I read a lot of BYOD horror stories these days, but this recent story hit just a little closer to home than others. About two years back, I was a victim of my company’s BYOD policies when my six-year old entered the wrong password just twice on my iPhone and we lost all of our Hawaii vacation pictures (not to mention the countless whiteboard photographs of business strategy sessions!) Network World tries to portray remote wipe of employee’s mobile devices as a “necessary evil” or cost of doing business. We think that is a load of bull. Your company can have a strong mobile security program in place without hampering the productivity of your end users. Contrary to what Bauer says, you SHOULD be able to pick up any device and access all your corporate data and applications on it without worrying about the security of that data. Armor5’s service was specifically designed to address the use cases covered in this article. By virtualizing data, content and applications in the cloud in a secure container and never letting the data hit the device in the first place, we deliver a secure but radically simple solution that meets IT and end user needs alike. We ensure that IT doesn’t have to play God with your personal device! Security solutions that deliver IT comfort and control don’t have to be hard on the user. You can have both. Check out our solution today, click here to sign up for a free trial!

#Cloud mobile security

SharePoint on my iPad? You gotta be kidding!

Welcome to the world of Armor5 where we make the impossible a reality every day. If you are an organization that has been in business for a few years now, chances are that every document that you really care about is sitting in that wonderful repository called SharePoint! You love it; you hate it. You can’t live with it, but you can’t live without it. It’s the lifeblood of your company. Your most sensitive documents are in there and now your employees want ALL that content on their iPad – on demand. As a responsible IT executive, you have resisted this constant demand to move all of your content out of SharePoint and into the cloud so that your employees can easily get at them. Security concerns and compliance requirements have prevented you from making a decision – but your employees don’t really care about all that. This is all about to change…

Armor5 has the perfect solution that will delight your end-users while providing you with all the visibility and control you need. Armor5 uses patent-pending mobile virtualization technology to provide instant access to your SharePoint on any device via the Armor5 service – accessed in the cloud through standard browsers and URL specific to your company.

You don’t need to change any configuration settings on your SharePoint server.

You don’t need to install any client on your employees device.Your employees are instantly productive without you having to make changes to enable that secure access.

Magic? Impossible? Nope, its just another day at Armor5. Don’t take our word for it! Try our service today with your SharePoint. Click here to get started!

Box.net meet good ol’ Network File Share!

So you want Box/Dropbox like functionality for your good ol’ Network File Share? You like Box.net because your employees: Can access the content from any device, anywhere. Can share/collaborate on documents. Don’t need to have VPN installed on their device to access those documents. But you don’t like Box.net because : You have to move content to the cloud and all the insecurities that come with it, not to mention snooping by Big Brother. You are loosing control and don’t know who is accessing which content on which device. You now have to buy another piece of software to map the roles/permissions you have set up in your Active Directory onto those services. You have to rely on those services to provide access control. If you want time fencing (for example, to limit access to financially sensitive documents during SEC filing) or geo fencing (only allow access from within the United States) you are out of luck! You have to manage your employees’ in one more location and remember to turn them off when they leave the company. You have to buy another piece of software to wipe your employees’ device clean when they leave the company, potentially exposing your company to law suits. You have to pay Box/Dropbox every month for all the content you store there, irrespective of whether it gets accessed by your employees or not. What if you could get all the things you like about Box/Dropbox, but none of the things you don’t like? And on top of it you also got: Built-in Data Leak Prevention, so that no corporate sensitive data is left behind on user’s devices. Dynamic watermarking of documents. The ability to quickly view an d edit documents, again on any device, without requiring additional expensive software. The ability to print documents to any printer of your choice, even on mobile devices like Android/Blackberry. The ability to move documents to Box/Dropbox under IT control and visibility. If a solution that makes your employees productive while allowing you to maintain security is what has been holding you back, wait no more. Give Armor5 a quick try.

Armor5, Inc.

Armor5 is a cloud service that provides instant mobile access to all enterprise network resources in a unique zero touch way using an existing VPN connection.

Armor5 For Enterprise Demo

Please go to our http://vimeo.com/channels/armor5 page

Armor5

Secure cloud access to all enterprise resources from any device. http://www.armor5.com/

Turbocharging SharePoint on Any Mobile Device

Ever used Microsoft SharePoint on a mobile device? What was that experience like? We’re guessing most users will say its performance was, well let’s just say ”suboptimal”. That’s being quite generous!

Here’s a typical workflow when using SharePoint on a smartphone or tablet today:

Begin by establishing a VPN connection.

Next launch your SharePoint application, either the native application or a web application. Before viewing even a single page of any document, you will need to download the entire document over your VPN-secured wireless connection. On slower connections this can take quite awhile. Next you must launch a mobile office productivity app such as Quickoffice to even view the document. Edits must be completed in Quickoffice, but then must be emailed or saved back to SharePoint. Along the way, Quickoffice often does destructive changes to the document, putting mobile workers like you pretty much at the mercy of these editors if you want to remain productive from the road. If you want to print the document, too bad. Mobile users of SharePoint are pretty much out of luck. You’ll need to email it to yourself, access it on your laptop or desktop, and then finally print it.

This creates some serious limitations. Just to re-iterate the issues:

The performance is downright awful. Downloading an 8MB presentation over a 3G/4G connection using VPN is like sucking cement through a straw. Better keep your fingers crossed that your VPN doesn’t get disconnected midway through, or else you have to start the whole process again, including that 8-10 second delay re-establishing a VPN connection over low bandwidth connections. The moment you use another application like Quickoffice to view or edit the document, your IT administrator has lost visibility and control of the document. Whoops, you may have just violated your company’s compliance or mobile security policies. Not being able to print and sign the document can cause serious delays in your productivity. Downloading malicious documents (heaven forbid) can result in your device being infected with malware. This has the potential to cause irreparable damage to both corporate and personal content on your device.

Contrast this typical SharePoint mobile experience with Armor5 (see the screenshot):

Connect to your company’s remote access portal using any browser. If you are coming over a flaky network connection, don’t worry. Your virtual session is on solid ground in the Armor5 cloud. You’ll benefit from a wired VPN connection back to your corporate data center. The connection will be there waiting for you to instantly reconnect in the event of a network disruption. Click on the SharePoint homepage icon for instant access to your SharePoint server. View SharePoint documents right within your browser. You don’t need to download the entire document. Our cloud-based document converter allows you to view pages of your document within a fraction of a second. Edit documents right in your browser using Microsoft-provided editors, maintaining 100% format fidelity. Save documents straight back to the source, without the need to download or upload documents. Only the incremental changes you make need to be uploaded back from your device. Print from your browser. Yes, you can print straight from your Android, iPad, Blackberry or Kindle device! You can print to the printer next to you, or send it to your printer at home while sitting at Starbucks. Thanks to Armor5′s Google Cloud Print integration, this is all under your control, and visible to your IT administrator.

Armor5 provides high performance, secure SharePoint access, allowing IT to maintain complete control all the time. Of course this same functionality is available when you use any enterprise application through Armor5 – be it SAP or your Intranet portal.

Go ahead and turbocharge your enterprise applications and try Armor5 for free today.

The Mobile Way of Collaborating

Let’s call it Mobile Collaboration 2.0…

Every so often we have the need to collaborate in real time with our work colleagues. If you are like me, you’ve used screen sharing solutions like WebEx, LogMeIn and Adobe Connect. Perhaps you have fiddled (scrambled is more like it) to install Java or Flash client software on your device to actually join or start a collaboration session. The braver among us have downloaded iOS or Android collaboration apps to participate in a mobile meeting… and many times have failed to install the app successfully. The reasons can range from your OS not being supported, or your OS version being too old for the app to care to support, or your phone (e.g. Window being too new, or your not having privileges to install software on your device, or, or, or…

Even when you are among the lucky few to successfully install a mobile collaboration app, the performance is downright awful! The reason behind this is a fundamental problem with mobile computing architecture:

Every existing screen sharing solution first sends the content down to your device, then grabs the screen and uploads it to a centralized server. So all the content needs to be downloaded, screen grabbed and uploaded. These 1.0 solutions publish to all session participants from the server. Every existing screen sharing solution works its magic by either sharing the frame buffer <ouch!> or Graphics Device Interface (GDI) commands. So whenever and every time you scroll, the entire screen needs to be grabbed, uploaded, sent, grabbed, uploaded, sent… multiple times.

You and your mobile collaborators can only pray none of you are on a 3G/4G connection. Suddenly “real time” isn’t so real.

Armor5 leapfrogs the current crop of mobile collaboration services by working on every device without needing to download any software. Both the presenter and all participants simply use the mobile browsers they have.

How?

Our screen share function accesses resources on your company’s server directly, then shares equally with all participants, be they presenter or audience. It’s a one-way download. No need to upload the presenter’s screen over low bandwidth connections ever again. Mobile bandwidth no longer determines the overall effectiveness of your meeting. The data downloaded from the central server isn’t raw frame buffer or graphics bitmaps. It’s pure HTML markup. This makes for very efficient collaboration. So even if a screen share participant is on 3G, they are as effective as the next guy. Let every mobile worker unite and scroll together without fear! This isn’t your dad’s screen share. It’s really ”smart co-browsing”. We can watermark documents using each session participant’s name, so they are more aware of sensitive data and content and more careful to not leak it. Finally here’s the coolest feature – real time redaction. Documents can be redacted based on each session participant’s role and permissions. Each participant is looking at the same document or web application only with portions simply blacked out if it’s confidential to them. They couldn’t leak data if they wanted to.

Armor5 allows mobile users to view all the popular document formats such as MS Office, Open Office and PDFs. Our service unifies your web applications and documents on the corporate Intranet with any of existing cloud services, public or private. So your mobile workforce can collaborate equally well in Salesforce.com with the VP of Sales as they can with the HR Manager in the company’s HR portal.

Why don’t you take Mobile Collaboration 2.0 for a spin today? Sign up for a free trial!

BYOD policy bites vacationing CEO

I read a lot of BYOD horror stories these days, but this recent story hit just a little closer to home than others. About two years back, I was a victim of my company’s BYOD policies when my six-year old entered the wrong password just twice on my iPhone and we lost all of our Hawaii vacation pictures (not to mention the countless whiteboard photographs of business strategy sessions!) Network World tries to portray remote wipe of employee’s mobile devices as a “necessary evil” or cost of doing business. We think that is a load of bull. Your company can have a strong mobile security program in place without hampering the productivity of your end users. Contrary to what Bauer says, you SHOULD be able to pick up any device and access all your corporate data and applications on it without worrying about the security of that data. Armor5’s service was specifically designed to address the use cases covered in this article. By virtualizing data, content and applications in the cloud in a secure container and never letting the data hit the device in the first place, we deliver a secure but radically simple solution that meets IT and end user needs alike. We ensure that IT doesn’t have to play God with your personal device! Security solutions that deliver IT comfort and control don’t have to be hard on the user. You can have both. Check out our solution today, click here to sign up for a free trial!

#Secure remote access

Box.net meet good ol’ Network File Share!

So you want Box/Dropbox like functionality for your good ol’ Network File Share? You like Box.net because your employees: Can access the content from any device, anywhere. Can share/collaborate on documents. Don’t need to have VPN installed on their device to access those documents. But you don’t like Box.net because : You have to move content to the cloud and all the insecurities that come with it, not to mention snooping by Big Brother. You are loosing control and don’t know who is accessing which content on which device. You now have to buy another piece of software to map the roles/permissions you have set up in your Active Directory onto those services. You have to rely on those services to provide access control. If you want time fencing (for example, to limit access to financially sensitive documents during SEC filing) or geo fencing (only allow access from within the United States) you are out of luck! You have to manage your employees’ in one more location and remember to turn them off when they leave the company. You have to buy another piece of software to wipe your employees’ device clean when they leave the company, potentially exposing your company to law suits. You have to pay Box/Dropbox every month for all the content you store there, irrespective of whether it gets accessed by your employees or not. What if you could get all the things you like about Box/Dropbox, but none of the things you don’t like? And on top of it you also got: Built-in Data Leak Prevention, so that no corporate sensitive data is left behind on user’s devices. Dynamic watermarking of documents. The ability to quickly view an d edit documents, again on any device, without requiring additional expensive software. The ability to print documents to any printer of your choice, even on mobile devices like Android/Blackberry. The ability to move documents to Box/Dropbox under IT control and visibility. If a solution that makes your employees productive while allowing you to maintain security is what has been holding you back, wait no more. Give Armor5 a quick try.

#secure mobile access

SharePoint on my iPad? You gotta be kidding!

Welcome to the world of Armor5 where we make the impossible a reality every day. If you are an organization that has been in business for a few years now, chances are that every document that you really care about is sitting in that wonderful repository called SharePoint! You love it; you hate it. You can’t live with it, but you can’t live without it. It’s the lifeblood of your company. Your most sensitive documents are in there and now your employees want ALL that content on their iPad – on demand. As a responsible IT executive, you have resisted this constant demand to move all of your content out of SharePoint and into the cloud so that your employees can easily get at them. Security concerns and compliance requirements have prevented you from making a decision – but your employees don’t really care about all that. This is all about to change…

Armor5 has the perfect solution that will delight your end-users while providing you with all the visibility and control you need. Armor5 uses patent-pending mobile virtualization technology to provide instant access to your SharePoint on any device via the Armor5 service – accessed in the cloud through standard browsers and URL specific to your company.

You don’t need to change any configuration settings on your SharePoint server.

You don’t need to install any client on your employees device.Your employees are instantly productive without you having to make changes to enable that secure access.

Magic? Impossible? Nope, its just another day at Armor5. Don’t take our word for it! Try our service today with your SharePoint. Click here to get started!

#Mobile device security

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