NetMotion Wireless enhances Mobility, Locality offerings

NetMotion Wireless recently announced enhancements to its Mobility and Locality software products for enterprises, including a native iOS Mobility application, remote updating of Mobility software, as well as greater administrative controls for Locality, such as greater cloud-based management and the ability to export data into GIS systems.

Last week, NetMotion Wireless released Mobility 10.5, which provides native iOS support for users opting to access the mobile-management platform from an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with full FIPS 140-2 validation and NSA Suite B without sacrificing performance, according to Tracy Crowe, NetMotion Wireless director of product marketing. Previously, iOS devices could view the Mobility platform only through a “stop-gap measure” via an unsecured third-party application, he said.

“With [Mobility] 10.5 now, it is truly a native support for iOS version 7.1 and later,” Crowe said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “It runs on the iPad, iPhone and even the iPod touch device—although, with the iPod touch just working on Wi-Fi, you don’t get the full advantage of Mobility.

“But you do get the single pane of glass that you’ve come to know and love from NetMotion. It still supports over 30 policy conditions, so you get that same ability to set up policies and conditions for users, groups of users, and to control network access and other resources.”

Yesterday, NetMotion Wireless released Mobility 10.51, which is focused on making it easier for administrators to automatically update Window clients—with appropriate flexibility for both administrators and end users to choose the best time to execute the updates, Crowe said.

“Because we have such a tremendous Windows installed base, we wanted to provide our Windows clients with the ability to do over-the-air updating,” he said. “So, we now have an automatic client-update service for Windows that allow administrators to do over-the-network updates—or even installations, for future Mobility clients and Locality agents.

“So, once you’re [Mobility] 10.51, it’s literally the last client you will have to manually install. After that, all updates and installations will be totally automatic.”

NetMotion yesterday also released version 2.1 of its Locality Server, which helps enterprises monitor real-time coverage and performance of their wireless connections. With the latest version of Locality, customers can track GPS status, Crowe said.

“With the additional reliance on location-based services, it’s become more and more important—and we’ve heard this from several of our customers—how do we know what’s going on with the GPS device? How do we know if the GPS is working or if it is getting turned off/turned on?” Crowe said. “We recognized that, as an administrator for a mobile deployment, you’ve got to have visibility into what’s going on out there, so we thought this was an important feature.”