Enterprises Outsource Their Mobile Device Management (MDM)

The ongoing cost of “mobilizing” the workforce has been soaring but some interesting management solutions are helping to keep costs under control.

Mobile devices aren’t cheap, but IT staff along with the cost of wireless plans for cellular voice, data, and (increasingly) messaging are going through the roof.

Although mobile device management has been around for a while (Wavelink, AirBeam, SOTi, Afaria, and others), CloudSync has introduced a new, inexpensive solution for Enerprises to outsource their mobile device management and eliminate the need to hire IT staff. In addition, CloudSync provides tools for identifying cellular plans that are over- or under- used so that these plans can be optimized or dropped.

Decisionpoint Solutions is now providing complete mobility services to enterprises, including hardware sale or lease, maintenance, staging, updating, repair, spares pool etc. and the are using CloudSync to provide the mobile device management.

CloudSync is a hosted, large-scale, web-based solution which enables service providers to keep customer devices in separate account. It’s expandable so that thousands of mobile devices can be managed on the same server in one- or as many customer accounts as are needed.

In addition, CloudSync regularly pulls cellular voice, data, and messaging utilization data from each device and can provide mid-month reports on wireless utilization.

GPS tracking, low-battery warnings, remote control help desk, and over-the-air software provisioning are additional tools that CloudSync provides to keep mobile workers working and to keep the mobile devices turned on and functioning.

see http://cloudsync.com/
+1 720-221-4444

How to set up an LXE VX6 for Coldboot Persistance

The LXE VX6 is a vehicle mounted terminal with a half VGA monitor and full qwerty keyboard running embedded CE. The unusual characteristic of this device is that it essential does a “cold-boot” when-ever you power off/on the device. Not sure why LXE architected the embedded CE build like this. Given that the common use of the device is to run a terminal window, LXE by default has RFTerm and AppLock already set for persistence in the base registry image, so if that’s all you are using it for there is no problem except start-up takes longer than it should given it is reinstalling the respective CAB files each time.

LXE VX6

If you are loading your own applications there are a few ways you can set them up for persistance:

1. Modify the Registry
2. Create a folder in “System” called “Startup” (\System\Startup) and place your CAB file there
3. Create a batch file and place it in \System\Startup

For the CloudSync application we chose the last method. The reason why is that most of our application already “lives” in the \System folder, and having it reinstall the application each time seemed excessive, and would ultimately slow down the boot process even more than needed. Secondly we didn’t want to rely on AppLock to start up our application and we didn’t want to have to modify the base registry image.

The nice thing about creating a “Batch” file is that it allowed us to do a sequence of actions before opening our application. This includes:

1. Moving files from a backup folder in “\System” to the “\Windows” folder
2. Create a folder in “\Program Files” for our log files
3. Run the application with parameters

Quite simply we opened up a text editor and wrote our the following lines

@echo off
copy \System\CloudSync\Backup\HtmlEngine.dll \windows
copy \System\CloudSync\Backup\ViaXML2.dll \windows
mkdir "\Program Files\CloudSync\CloudManager\Logs"
start \system\cloudsync\cloudmanager\athena.exe -hidden -config \system\cloudsync\cloudmanager\config

We didn’t have to worry about checking if a file or folder existed as we knew they would get blown away each boot cycle. We saved the file as a “cloudsync.bat” file and placed in the “\System\Startup” folder and it runs beautifully every time.

Welcome ScanOnline

We would like to welcome ScanOnline Data Solutions to the CloudSync family of Partners. ScanOnline located in North Carolina provides Hardware, Software, and Professional Services Barcode Scanning and RFID applications as well as an online store to purchase scanners . The following is taken from the ScanOnline web site : www.scanonline.com :

ScanOnline is the leading full service e-commerce site serving the barcode data collection and point of sale market place. Our focus is to serve the customer with the highest quality, lowest priced product available. We offer expert staff ready to assist in your selection of barcode products. Our service group is ready to implement your data collection project including site surveys and turn-key installations. Please contact us for more information.