As you may or may not know Symantec has historically provided a handheld management solution, and more recently mobile management solution. Some of the capabilities of Mobile Management Suite include:
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Software Deployment and Configuration
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Distribute and apply pre-configured device settings to maintain common device configurations
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Enhanced Over-the-air Deployment
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Granular Application Management
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Remote control
For more information please go to
http://www.symantec.com/business/mobile-management
Since I don’t currently own a mobile device and I wanted to get more familiar with this solution I resorted to using a mobile emulator. This article will discuss the steps needed to get the environment setup. One important note for my environment is that everything was done from a single VM. I do not have a domain controller as well as DNS and WINS. I simply used VMware Workstation and my single VM.
Here are the steps:
1. First off I setup the Symantec Management Platform (aka Notification Server). I then selected Symantec Mobile Management SP1 from the list of products.
2. Next I download and installed Windows Mobile 6.1 Emulator. I found this at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3d6f581e-c093-4b15-ab0c-a2ce5bffdb47&displaylang=en. I selected the “Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Images (USA).msi” link as the standard one seemed to be a corrupted MSI.
3. Install the select MSI
4. Next I downloaded and installed Microsoft Active Sync. For whatever reason I had to cradle my emulator in order for communication to work. Of course you do not require this for a physical handheld properly connected to your corporate network. I downloaded the latest version of MS Active Sync.
5. Launch the emulator Start-->All Programs-->Windows Mobile 6 SDK-->Standalone Emulator Images-->US English-->WM 6.1 Professional
6. Next you need to configure the network settings of the emulator so that it can communicate with the SMP (aka NS). Select File->Configure
7. On the network tab check the box to enable to network adaptor to bind to the VM network driver
8. Next you need to configure the network settings from within the emulator itself. On the device select
a. Start-->Settings
b. Click on the Connections tab
c. Then click on Network Cards
d. Select the network card that you bound the emulator to
e. Click edit
f. Ensure that you have the server assigned IP selected
g. Click on the names server tab
h. Enter in the IP of the DNS that is the same for the VM network. I found this by going to a command prompt and enter in “ipconfig /all”. The IP will most likely be the VM network adapter of your VM host.
i. Click “ok” at the top right hand corner of the screen
The last step was to cradle the device. You do this by launching Start-->All Programs-->Windows Mobile 6 SDK-->Tools-->Device Emulator Manager, then right click on the device GUID and select “cradle”
The remaining steps involve going through the user guide and installing the agent on the mobile device. The trickiest part was ensuring that the mobile device had name resolution to the SMP (aka NS). In your production environment this is the most important thing to ensure.
As a side note to this article I had some difficulty getting some of the mobile device screen shots for this article. I actually used the remote control capability along with the screen shot capability built into the Mobile Management console.
Hope this works out for all of you.