Essential Features of Enterprise Mobile App Store

The Smartphone technology offers everyone the ability to become productive anywhere they are and at any time of the day.The enterprise application store is a place from where smartphone apps are privately downloaded by an organization's workforce and put to use for mobilization of the company's services and products. This is the reason why downloading software from an enterprise app store must be a secure process. Keeping this in mind, let’s look at some features that every enterprise app store must have:

 

1. Improved Security Methods: Security has become a top priority now. There should be high level of security measures for each platform such as strong passwords, encrypting the application data store. There should be high level of security measures that it should alert the organization of sources of trouble and also be able to successfully prevent similar future attacks.

 

2. Registration Process to be Made Mandatory: In an effort to raise the security standards of enterprise app stores, every organization should create and regularly update a database where the mobile device details of the workforce allowed access to enterprise app stores are listed. The reason why this registration process should be made compulsory is because of the fact that it will henceforth become easier for assigning mobile application downloading privileges to specific groups of employees, thereby helping raise the standard of security. It will also enable easy tracking of employees not adhering to guidelines laid down by the enterprise app store

 

3. Support for Multiple Mobile Platforms: This will enable the store to cater to all the mobile systems existent in the current market. The ideal enterprise app store is one which allows employees to download software via both mobile web browsers and enterprise app marketplaces, with support of the iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone platforms.

 

4. Ability to Send Notifications: Administrators should be allowed permission send notifications using the push capability of the supported mobile platforms. The notifications alert the user about available updates for apps installed on the device.

 

5. Publishing Process: The publishing process needs to be simplified for submission, approval and withdrawal of apps that are intended for the app store. A well-defined set of guidelines should be published as to what are the acceptable policies for approval of apps. This is also an area where the company's best practices, polices and design guidelines can be validated and enforced.

 

6. Updates: Mobile development process is typically iterative, with the features being added over a period of time. Even the core functionality is launched piecemeal to reduce the time to market the application. This approach allows the developers to balance agility with thoroughness. In order to support this process, the store must be able to support the updation of the applications over the air (also known as OTA). This is required for updating existing apps, installing patches and other maintenance related fixes. An EAS should include a feature to push the updates to the device and notify users through the notification system on the device.

 

7. Gatekeeper to the Public Stores: In situations where the device is used for both enterprise and personal use, the user may want to access the public product stores. In such situations, the EAS can act as a mediator between the employee and the public store, and can ensure that all downloads are safe, and compliant with the company policy. Corporate discounts and volume licensing of commercial products can also be enforced through this mechanism.

 

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Enterprise Mobile Apps - Creation is Just the Beginning

When you are surrounded by something in abundance, it starts to lose its value in your mind. What used to feel like a luxury becomes a commodity. We have seen so many technologies follow this path to ignominy. Mobile apps are another such technology that has become a commodity. There are just too many of them. It is common to hear someone say that mobile apps are very easy, because somebody they know has also developed one. What usually gets missed is that even though it may have been a great feat for the poorly regarded relative or friend to develop a new app, it undoubtedly would not have been an enterprise class product.

 

This is a fact of a developer’s life that a lot of people do not realize. It takes a lot more than a few lines of code to create an enterprise app. There are multiple steps involved in the creation of an enterprise application.

 

1. Design: As the old adage goes, “well begun is half done”, design is the most critical part of the entire process. There are multiple stages to this process too. First, the process flows are decided. This is where different use cases and the outcomes are frozen. The entire functionality of the intended product is mapped out in visual diagrams. The next phase is the wireframe models, where the actual screens start getting designed, along with the positions of the different components, branding, and color schemes. Lastly, you do storyboarding, where the actual interfaces are created and reviewed.

 

Other critical components to be covered during the design phase are finalizing the underlying infrastructure and integration requirements for the go live. This is a common mistake made by the developers, where they are too focused on the code, that they ignore the infra components.

 

2. Development: Once the application specs are finalized, the development takes place. This is primarily coding, followed by deep testing, QA checks and rollout. Typically the rollout happens in two stages – a controlled launch for a pilot user group, followed by a general availability (which happens in the next phase). An important aspect of the development and testing is the infrastructure readiness and integrations with the internal IT systems.

 

3. Deployment: In order to make the application available, it has to be hosted at either the enterprise datacenter, or in the cloud. Also, the distribution mechanism can be either the internal app store, or a commercial one. Once the app is ready and tested, it needs to be deployed and made available through the chosen distribution mechanism.

 

4. Documentation: All design documentation, user manuals, administration guides and troubleshooting guides need to be prepared as a part of the development lifecycle. The documentation is often not given its due importance, even though it is critical for the future sustainability. It is not necessary that the development team will forever be a part of the same team that owns the application. Therefore, it is important to document well, so that the support, maintenance and enhancement teams are able to run with it.

 

5. Support and Maintenance: Once the product goes live, and starts being used, you need a team to support it. The support includes bug fixes, customer service desk calls, and most importantly, upgrades. You will typically not have the entire feature set launched in one go, and even if you do, you would want to add functionality over a period of time. It is the support team that is responsible for all that work, and each upgrde needs to go through the entire development cycle again.

 

Copper Mobile is one of leading Dallas mobile application development firm. With best in class app developers in Dallas, the company is regarded as one of the top app development Dallas firm