After wading through the WWDC content from a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d give a quick update on what Apple are giving enterprise customers with their iOS 11 offering, due in September this year.
It’s so exciting to see… wait for it….
WIFI IMPROVEMENTS ON KIOSK DEVICES.
LOWER BANDWIDTH UPDATE IMPROVEMENTS
FULL APPLE TV DEP FEATURES!!
Yep – boring.
Most of the new management features that came out of the WWDC lab for device management centred around education again. However, the iOS 11 update brings some great opportunities for business that you won’t see in your MDM vendor’s three hour webinars.
Apple are opening up the NFC Chip… kind of.
This opens up a whole new set of applications that businesses can use for their shiny mobile devices for. In large corporations the ID card is king; giving access to buildings, desktop IT equipment and even in-house payment terminals in cafeterias etc. This paired with BLE beacons will finally allow large businesses to ditch the lanyards and use phone based authentication systems which are more secure… think ‘touchID’ authorisation to enter certain rooms.
Augmented Reality
No, It isn’t a Jamiroquai album. Apple is building new APIs into IOS 11 to help developers take advantage of the augmented reality capabilities of the hardware. For corporates this could mean interactive digital signage in buildings, visual meeting aides in presentations or nice interactive 3D infographics for product and data science teams. It’s the next step before Apple eventually enters the VR headset arena and the new support for HTC Vive devices in High Sierra supports that.
Metal 2
Direct graphics chipset processing access has been provided though the new Metal 2 APIs, which isn’t just for games. Machine learning and proper number crunching can take place right in the pockets of corporate employees. Why spend money on AWS elastic processing when you can distribute the processing over the idle devices you control?
Productivity!!
Cool new drag and drop, super low latency for refresh rates on the iPad pro and the Files app give the iPad Pro a boost as an every day productivity device. Apple Pencil will work great with the new refresh rate and the new middle ground screen size will all go a long way to persuading users to ditch the laptop and work on an iPad Pro.