iPad@Work: Don’t Blame The Players

>When the district sales managers of a luxury retailer logged into their corporate email accounts on shiny, new iPads for the first time, at the same time, cheers went up.

>But something else went down: the Lotus Notes server.

>Imagine all those iPads simultaneously downloading the full dump of Lotus Notes. Don’t point the finger at IT for this technical gridlock, not this time. The IT department didn’t even know about the iPad rollout until it was too late, and still had to deal with the fallout.

They hooked up to Lotus Notes & the IT Department didn’t even know it was being rolled out. _REALLY_?

If your IT department doesn’t even know that some rogue consultants had manage to either set up the Notes Traveler on their infrastructure or hook up a mobile device management(MDM) service like Good Technologies to their Domino servers then the whole team should be fired. You can’t blame Apple or iPad for creating a device that folks actually want to use, but you can put the blame on very bad decision-making and an IT department that appears to have its head in the sand rather than acknowledge that it’s customer aren’t very happy with the _status quo_.

The rest of this article is actually pretty good at explaining how Apple works with Big IT CO’s to help them prepare and plan for seamless integration. Apple alone has led the consumer market in provide BlackBerry-like integration and administration of their devices through MDM partners like [AirWatch](http://air-watch.com) and [Mobile Iron](http://mobileiron.com). And how there are actually plenty of good resources out there like Gartner and Forrester to help you figure out what the best practices are. The truth is that everyone from Dell to MacAffee have been throwing their hat into the MDM ring to try to get a piece on the iPad action.

I guess what really bugged me about this piece was that the author managed to find the most back water company running Notes and who’s IT department is so completely incompetent that they don’t realize everyone is walking around with iPads and that maybe some of them have found a way to get their email on it. Either that or the author has fabricated the entire scenario where Lotus Notes has a magical MS Exchange like service that users can turn on without any kind of infrastructure changes or firewall mods by at least __ONE PERSON__ in IT.

via [iPad in the enterprise: IT must stay ahead of the curve](http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/ipad-in-the-enterprise-it-must-stay-ahead-of-the-curve/145349).

6 comments