Android For The Enterprise?

The Droid is arguably the first phone since the iPhone to really make a splash in the market and there are many reviews of the handset. While aimed at the consumer, chances are you will be supporting them in the enterprise. Rim's Blackberry has a foothold in the enterprise today and with a few more features, Android based phones like the Droid are more than capable of replacing them. The question is, how well will the Droid and Android fit into your enterprise?

The Droid is more than capable of replacing other handhelds. First off, the Droid is very easy to use. The applications have a consistent UI which makes learning new applications simple. Installing and updating applications via the Android Market is a snap. Desktop syncing is a bit of a challenge, since there isn't a desktop sync program, but all activity occurs wirelessly and most consumers will be happy with this slick little phone.

Applications on Android have a very modular architecture; each is, by default, independent of all other applications. Android is Linux-based and inherits the Unix userID model. Each Android application runs under its own userID and launches a new JVM under a new process. If one Android application crashes, it shouldn't affect other applications at all. By the same token, Android applications don't share data or libraries, other than those supplied by Android. The SDK has functions that allow for interprocess communications as designated by the application developer. If you are going to be supporting Android phones, and it's a good bet that you will be, it's worth getting an overview of Android's application framework.

The Android operating system has a fairly robust permissions system but the platform isn't fully open, which hobbles what you can do centrally. For example, the enterprise can't control whether users install applications and can't stop users from uninstalling applications. It would be nice for an enterprise to be able to add programs for device management or enterprise applications and ensure that users couldn't uninstall them. The Android OS, which is a custom Linux distribution, has the capability to segregate applications at the file system and process level, and it is capable of having applications installed that the user can access but not delete.

Verizon's Droid has a number of pre-installed applications like a Facebook client and Visual Voicemail that can't be removed by the phone's owner. Right now, there is no way for enterprise IT to deploy similarly protected applications but it's coming. A Google Spokesperson said:

It would also be ideal to have a way to back up all applications and data. On Android, applications are installed and stored using unique userIDs. By default, Android application permissions don't allow reading, although the application developers can mark their applications and data as readable by the world, the reasoning being that if you can copy the app, you can steal it. The side-effect is that protected applications and their data can't be backed-up and recovered without root access. (I also haven't found a way to get root access. Yet.). Public applications can be backed up and data stored on the SD card. That means, of course, that any enterprise applications that store data locally should use a directory outside the protected directory so that you can back-up the data.

Email and Calendar
Droid comes with some nice ready-to-use applications, and you can find more in the Android Market place, though you will have to set-up a Google account first. The first thing I did was set-up email. Setting up Gmail was simple. I just entered my username/password and that's it. The Gmail client treats labels like IMAP folders, so I modified which email gets synced by altering the download schedule on each label. I also have an email account hosted on Google Apps, so I set-up multiple accounts. 

Setting up Exchange is just as easy. If your company uses Outlook Web Access, it's a simple matter of adding your user account and password, then setting your email server address. Less than five minutes and I had email, calendar and contacts synced. Since all of the traffic travels over SSL, there are no worries about snooping. The calendar events are separate programs and unfortunately, there is no way to sync tasks and notes with the default applications. You will need an app for that.

Beyond basic email reading and replying, forget trying to download attachments. While reading PDFs from a website is easy, downloading the attachment using the outlook client simply failed and offered no indication as to why. That puts the kibosh on activity like reading documents or spread sheets. The G-mail client will open attachments, but in read-only mode with the installed software that comes with the Droid. If you want to edit Microsoft Office documents, you will have to purchase software to do that. One option to open attachments  is to forward your documents to a G-mail account and download them that way, but that's an extra step. Sending attachments, however, is not a problem.

The calendaring works a little better once you see it in action but Outlook users will be initially confused because they are used to accepting calendar events in email, not in the calendar. On Android, the email, calendar and contact applications are all separate. This is by design. When you receive a calendar invitation in email, there is no attachment and there is no way to accept. Once you read the email, the invitation ends up in the calendar application. If you hold your finger over the event in the calendar, you get a pop-up menu asking if you want to accept, decline or set as tentative. Select an option, and the event is set.The bad part is that there's no visual indication in the calendar application as to which calendar events are accepted or tentative. In Outlook, tentative calendar events are visually marked. In the Droid calendar, you can't tell unless you hover your finger over it. I think there needs to be some method of differentiation, or at least let the user set colors or other visual cues, to accomplish this. You can send calendar invitations to users from the calendar application.

Other apps like Facebook and the Gallery work well enough. Perhaps the weakest part of the Internet feel is the browser, which doesn't support media types like Adobe Flash. You may be thinking that Flash support is no big loss, but how many websites that you use everyday are starting to use Flash for menus and other interactive components? Flash is pretty important. It's available on the HTC Hero, but not on the Droid.

Security
There isn't much security built in except to protect the applications and the phone itself. Any additional security will have to be added through software, though as already mentioned, anyone with access to the phone will be able to easily uninstall security related applications. This is another case where having a way to install an application would be helpful.

There is an authentication mechanism which is used to grant access to the phone.  Android has a 3x3 grid that which you draw a pattern on. You can set-up the panel to show the pattern while you authenticate or not, the latter is an attempt to hide your pattern from shoulder surfing. It takes some getting used to, but once you get the hang of the drawing, it's pretty simple. Except for the smudges.

On a clean screen, one calculation results in 389,112 possible patterns. But like passwords, I bet the pool of patterns used in the field is far lower, largely due to lack of user imagination. For instance, one person pointed out how common the Zorro pattern is.Beyond that, our fingers have oils and they will be deposited on the screen over time. If you don't clean the screen, then the pattern emerges even if you use the touch screen to scroll. So it's likely that an moderately clever person could open your phone easily. Now given the helpful password caching the email programs have—and there does't appear to be a way to disable password caching in either email program—if someone gets your phone, they get your email and anything else that is unlocked. This is obviously a huge shortcoming if you tend to misplace your phone.

A relevant aside: a recent survey of New York taxi drivers by Credant Technologies found that on average around 5,000 mobile phones a month more than 500 other handheld devices, including iPods, laptops and memory sticks, are left in cabs every month. Clearly, the ability to lock your phone is pretty important.

Geeking Out
Like many of you, I want to do more with my phone than play music and games. I want to be productive. When I first had my Treo 700P, I was trying out a demo of a Windows Terminal Services program. I was traveling, and we had a server issue that needed my attention. I had no Wi-Fi and no  time to go look for power and a signal. So I fired up Terminal Services on my Treo and after a lot of zooming in and out and scrolling back and forth, I fixed the issue. Oh, and I still made my flight. I was hooked. Between Terminal services and an SSH client, there wasn't anything I couldn't fix.

On the Droid, there are fun apps like Find Starbucks, but there are many useful apps for the IT geek in all of us. These are all free or ad supported:

The Droid is a cool, fun appliance with a lot of functionality, though it still falls short in a few key areas for enterprise use. It will be fun to see what they'll include in the next upgrade. People are going to be using this phone, so it's worth getting ready.