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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 personal phone I carry is none of my IT department's business, and I like it that way--thank you very much. I don't want to EVER get into a situation where my workplace has a legal case for subpoenaing my personal phone.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm going to have to go with "Me", Regis.
I have no problem using or not using it for work. If they want something specific, they can feel free to shell for it.
As far as "connecting" to the network, I have no issue with what you use, assuming it isn't a device made for malevolence. However, when you come running into my office at 4:56 wanting help with your $latest_awesome_phone, that I know nothing about, then I start to wonder if letting you use your home device for work was a good idea. Or when you want me to enable IMAP because that's all that a single employee's phone supports (and we use Exchange/MAPI like most similar companies), then again, I wonder why we let people use personal devices.
But it is great to think of dumping all the procurement/management onto the end user...
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
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.
Or when you want me to enable IMAP because that's all that a single employee's phone supports (and we use Exchange/MAPI like most similar companies), then again, I wonder why we let people use personal devices.
You know, because ticking a single box to enable IMAP is hard. And because you wouldn't want to allow pretty much every device under the sun, rather than a few in the exclusive have-paid-microsoft/are-microsoft club to connect.
Well - under these conditions, it becomes your responsibility to educate the poor fool. Really, you MUST launch into a tirade/lecture, informing him that impulsive buying, without even researching what the hell he needs or wants is the sign of a seriously diseased mind, and that his status as an employee is in jeopardy. Offer to help him, and when he agrees, reach into your desk for the 3 pound hammer, smash the damned phone, and tell him that it just your little secret - you won't tell management that he's a senile moron who is losing his tenuous grip on reality.
At this point, you inform him of the half dozen best choices for a personal phone, and usher him out of your office/cubicle/dungeon.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
Who amongst the horde of slashdotters can lift a 3-lb hammer, let alone use it to smash something?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
Provided that it fits into the existing security framework & other policies for auditing, yes.
We don't allow IMAP/POP connections either. In our company, if you're allowed remote access to email, you have an RSA token for outlook web access, a blackberry, or a company-owned laptop with vpn access.
Allowing arbitrary IMAP connections makes brute-forcing/denial-of-service possible, and makes it easy to transfer large amounts of email to non-company owned devices (with unknown security).
Not everyone cares about this sort of thing, but some of have to.
I don't know what GP was thinking... BOFH-tactics usually involve electricity and/or Halon.
$ make available
enable IMAP because that's all that a single employee's phone supports (and we use Exchange/MAPI like most similar companies),
Sounds like you are the problem. That is not a standard documented protocol.
"If your users want to use something you don't yet support, it's your job to figure out how to support it."
WRONG. It is the job of IT to help the business make money. If the cost of supproring a SINGLE user getting their toy working exceeds the benefit to the business of getting said toy to work, then it is the rational decision to say no.
And you might think that. Just tick the IMAP box. Except then you suddenly need to pay attention to any announced vunerablities in the IMAP service. You might suddenly have passwords going clear-text across the internet. And your phone might not support the SSL versions of IMAP. And supporting SSL IMAP might mean servers that didn't previously have to be set up SSL (with certificates) now need to. Never mind opening the firewall ports up. And the whole extra service to remember to configure and maintain next time there's a server upgrade. Another thing to document - the cost is far more than just 'tick a box'.
Never mind that chances are your toy phone doesn't support it. And if there's an issue with your phone sending email, who are you going to blame? Yourself, or the IT Dept?
See, what you also don't realise is that people want the IT dept to support *their phone* and tell them how to set it up on their phone. This means that IT, instead of having to know everything about phones they support, have to know everything about every phone their employees might potentially buy. YOU might be able to self-support, but most employees simply can't.
Bitter? Perhaps. But supporting single user flights of fancy is not necessarially rational. You don't know the aggregate load that all these litte features palce on people.
I'll let the 'environment control me' when I get a budget large enough to take on whatever the end-users can throw at me. Until that unlikely day occurs I will continue to control my environment, extending it as much as my budget allows. To do anything else is fiscally irresponsible and simply bad for business regardless of what you think.
I can't agree with you. IT's job is to keep the network and devices running. Not to be jerked around by the latest whims of the users. IT has responsibilities beyond making the users happy. If that can be accomplished while continuing to ensure the safety and security of the network, fine. But dropping a random device into the network is irresponsible. And unencrypted IMAP may not be acceptable use to some companies. So it's more than "just ticking a checkbox".
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 /.