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Who Should Own Your Smartphone?
snydeq writes "The great corporate barrier against employees using personal smartphones in business contexts has been breached, writes InfoWorld's Galen Gruman. According to a recent report from Forrester Research, half of the smartphones in use among US and Canadian businesses are not company-issued equipment. In fact, some organizations are even subsidizing employees' service plans as an easy way to avoid the procurement and management headaches of an increasingly standard piece of work equipment. Gruman discusses the pros and cons of going with a subsidized, employee-owned smartphone plan, which is part of a larger trend that sees IT loosening its grip on 'dual-use' devices, including laptops and PCs."
The rule where I work (Netflix) is simple:
1. We give you a Blackberry or an iPhone (you pick)
2. We pay for the plan
3. You use it responsibly
4. You figure out what "responsibly" means.
5. There is no Rule 5
Granted, we're a smaller company, but we've taken the opposite approach. In the office, you either have a Mac Mini or an iMac. But when people are hired, we pay them a $3,500 signing bonus with the expectation that it is to buy a new laptop of their choice. Overwhelmingly they buy MacBook Pro's and add XP or Windows 7 with VMware/Parallels and we add $45 to the first paycheck of the month to cover data plans and "business" minutes/texts on their cell phones.
We find that they usually take much better care of the laptops when it's "their" laptop and it beats having to carry two cell phones.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Sorry, to self reply, but I realise that the point I'm making here is rather cryptic. Your job as a sysadmin is to make sure that people can do their job in as straightforward a way possible, that means that you should be bending for your users. If your users want to use something you don't yet support, it's your job to figure out how to support it.
I appreciate that there are times where you get a higher payoff by saying "fuck that one guy with the weird kit, we'll get more by giving benefit to those 100 guys over there instead", but not ticking the IMAP box is not one of those times. By ticking the IMAP box you get to let everyone work how they want, and lose nothing.
Personally, I'm not so concerned about the "company could assert some ownership over my device" angle, so much as the "I'm not on call so my Blackberry is at home, good luck reaching me" angle. I try to keep work out of my personal life as much as possible, no way in hell am I going to get work mail on my personal smartphone.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Oh, but then what does the mighty IT department do? Actually many devices support the Exchange-only servers, but enabling IMAP+SSL would probably cover all devices currently on the market (even my 2y old HTCs). And it's not a single user usually, once enable many could profit. And updates come automatically these days. So, dear admins, do the magic of checking the box and then you can get back to reading /.