EAS v14.1, out-of-the-box support for pure IPSec VPNs and KeyChain
It’s taken a while, but it looks like Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) is finally getting pushed out to devices that had previously run on Android 2.3 (“Gingerbread”). Samsung’s Galaxy S II is getting the upgrade first and will be followed by other Samsung devices such as the Galaxy Note, the Galaxy SII LTE and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (and yes, that’s a lot of Galaxies). Motorola’s Droid devices are expected to get Ice Cream Sandwich later in the year, meanwhile.
The point is that Ice Cream Sandwich is finally starting to get pushed out to popular mobile devices after languishing on just 1% of all Android devices for the past couple of months. With this in mind, I thought it would be a good time to go over some of the major enterprise features that Ice Cream Sandwich will deliver to IT users. While the newest version of Android won’t make it as enterprise-friendly as BlackBerry, it will give IT departments some additional control over how they manage their Android-based smartphones and tablets. Here’s a quick rundown:
- Support for four additional Exchange ActiveSync policies. This will obviously be important for IT users because it will give them further control over users’ email options, including support for limiting email attachment size, disabling a user’s ability to download attachments, disabling a user’s camera and forcing a user to sync up their device manually while they are roaming. In total, then, Ice Cream Sandwich will now be able to enforce 16 different EAS policies.
- Out-of-the-box support for “pure” IPSec VPNs. That’s right, Android is finally getting native support for plain-old IPSec VPNs, meaning you can easily install Cisco’s widely-used IPSec VPN onto your users’ Android devices. This marks the fifth VPN standard that Android supports out of the box, joining L2TP, L2TP/IPSec PSK, L2TP/IPSec RSA and PPTP.
- Authentication made easier. Although previous versions of Android delivered key store support for VPNs and Wi-Fi authentication, they left mobile applications entirely on their own, forcing them to maintain their own key stores. As Google notes on its Android Developers blog today, this “can present manageability issues… where multiple certificates may be shared across a number of apps such as Email and Browser.” Ice Cream Sandwich adds a new application programming interface (API) called KeyChain that gives users the ability to give applications access to their credentials and that lets IT deparments set policies for applications’ access to the key store.
And so that’s Ice Cream Sandwich and its enterprise features. As I’ve written about many times before, Ice Cream Sandwich also has several other nifty features, including a lock screen that can unlock using facial recognition software; Android Beam, technology that lets users send contact information, directions, Web pages and more via NFC by tapping their phones together; and integration with the Google+ social network that lets users host online video chats among their circles of friends. Oh, and Ice Cream Sandwich should hopefully make IT departments’ lives easier by virtue of the fact that it’s designed to work the same way on both tablets and smartphones.
Anyway, here’s hoping you get a chance to work with the platform and get familiar with it before Google unleashes Android 5.0 (“Jellybean”) by the end of the year…
