What are the security issues with the iPad and how is it suited as a device for developing enterprise scale applications?

Those are the questions we posed to Ken Westin, the founder and CEO of ActiveTrak. Westin is a a security expert. His company develops a software and a service to track the location of a device if lost or stolen. In June, the company is introducing an enterprise version of its technology that will also go by the name ActiveTrak.

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The iPad will become a device that we will undoubtedly see in the enterprise. It fits into the same space as a smartphone or social computing technology, applicable to personal and work life. Neville Hobson on the NextWeb cites a survey by Sybase about the interest in smart phones for the workplace and its correlation to the iPad.

But Westin says the iPad does have its own set of limitations that makes it an issue for development of enterprise security grade applications:

• The iPhone and iPad software has built-in PPTP, IPSec, Cisco VPN software. But more companies are moving to SSL VPN, which is not supported by the iPad. In time, though, a client should be developed for the product.
• The device may be able to access the domain, however it is different from being a domain member as an administrator cannot manage it, enforce group policies or push patches or apps to it.

Westin is supported by other security experts who cite Apple’s lack of interest in security issues:

“The general consensus is that Apple continues to do only the absolute minimum to address enterprise security and supportability requirements,” noted Andrew Storms, Director of Security Operations for nCircle. `We haven’t seen any new enterprise iPhone security features from Apple since the summer of 2009 when they introduced their new hardware level encryption, which was almost immediately subverted. This is not the kind of behavior security professionals want to see in vendors.’

Recent events seem to illustrate that point. Security researches were able to compromise a fully-updated iPhone 3GS at the recent CanSecWest Pwn2Own competition. Storms warned me “If the iPad has the same OS as the iPhone then enterprises are going to be even more concerned about the data on this device.’ “

Westin said it is the background processing in particular that makes the iPad less appealing for ActiveTrak. For instance, its application runs in the background on an Android device. An iPad, and for that matter an iPhone, does not provide that capability.

His company does provide a free application for the iPhone. It’s free but it can only be activated if someone turns it on. To maneuver around the issue, Westin said they disguise the app button as a Safari icon, which activates the application. That’s when the tracking starts by triangulation techniques using WiFi and GPS.

Westin is a fan of Apple. He uses a MacBook Pro. He says developer tools are better on the iPhone and it has a great community. But, Apple wants it all. It controls the hardware, the software and the content. That’s a concern for the enterprise that wants to adopt the iPad. Such control over content is a problem as it gives Apple the power to wipe an application off a device without permission. That may seem unlikely in an enterprise setting but the possibility does lead to hesitation.

Further, Apple may make great high end products for consumers but it does not have the equivalent of a Blackberry server that can control the device and its content. Instead, the individual must have a MobileMe account. This can become a coordination nightmare for IT if the enterprise has 5,000 people who need an iPad.

Westin said ActiveTrak will wait until the iPad platfrom opens up more before developing.

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In the past few weeks we’ve seen more references to FourSquare as a potential enterprise tool. The discussion represents an emerging law of Enterprise 2.0 Inevitably, a consumer trend in the social technology space will start to seep into the business world.

Hutch Carpenter of Spigit says it is a two-year lag before the enterprise adopts a social computing trend. He writes that wikis emerged in 2002 as a consumer tool and by 2004 came into the enterprise. Social networking emerged in 2006 and by 2008 had made its way into a business context. Microblogging hit in 2007 and by 2009 it became a central part of the Enteprise 2.0 suite.

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And so as the social concept of location based networks emerges in 2010, Carpenter’s bet is that we will see location based networks arrive into the enterprise by 2012. For reference, Spigit is an idea management platform. It is referenced by <a href="Dennis Howlett “>Dennis Howlett in the comments of Mark Fidelman’s CloudAve post as a company that could potentially enable this capability.

“If i’ve understood you correctly what you are suggesting sounds fine in theory but i’d prefer solutions like Spigit which do a very good job of surfacing peer reviewed ideas but using algorithms that avoid the inevitable gaming problem.”

Using Carpenter’s theory, here are some additional possibilities we can think of:

• IT Admins may have control over who is able to post to their location and in what context.
• Location-based systems will be required for some jobs. Permissions will be controlled by a business manager or IT administrator.
• A new generation of location-based applications will integrate with microblogging platforms.
• Web-oriented dashboard environments will provide live updates for managers to get an immediate view of their team with updates that are filtered to different communities based on the employee’s work role.
• Foursquare and Gowalla will be important for adoption but the first dominant player will probably be a new company or a company with an understanding of the importance of location-based systems.

These outcomes do seem plausible. In the current generation of Enterprise 2.0 applications, we see the emergence of similar trends. IT Admin is becoming a basic requirement for cloud-based, collaborative applications that serve the enterprise. We could name everyone here but just look at the latest crop of new arrivals. Both Novell’s Pulse and Status.net make this requirement standard in its microblogging applications.

How location based networks affects the way we view employees will become one of the most important issues in this brave, new world.

Enterprise data, bound together by data analysis, may become such a tightly woven fabric that recommendations can be made at each check-in. Suggestions about work habits may become part of the network. How we view our basic civil liberties will be challenged. But in the end, we’ll keep looking out two years, waiting for the next consumer wave while managing the reality of working in a transparent universe.

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In the past few weeks we’ve seen more references to FourSquare as a potential enterprise tool. The discussion represents an emerging law of Enterprise 2.0 Inevitably, a consumer trend in the social technology space will start to seep into the business world.

Hutch Carpenter of Spigit says it is a two-year lag before the enterprise adopts a social computing trend. He writes that wikis emerged in 2002 as a consumer tool and by 2004 came into the enterprise. Social networking emerged in 2006 and by 2008 had made its way into a business context. Microblogging hit in 2007 and by 2009 it became a central part of the Enteprise 2.0 suite.

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And so as the social concept of location based networks emerges in 2010, Carpenter’s bet is that we will see location based networks arrive into the enterprise by 2012. For reference, Spigit is an idea management platform. It is referenced by <a href="Dennis Howlett “>Dennis Howlett in the comments of Mark Fidelman’s CloudAve post as a company that could potentially enable this capability.

“If i’ve understood you correctly what you are suggesting sounds fine in theory but i’d prefer solutions like Spigit which do a very good job of surfacing peer reviewed ideas but using algorithms that avoid the inevitable gaming problem.”

Using Carpenter’s theory, here are some additional possibilities we can think of:

• IT Admins may have control over who is able to post to their location and in what context.
• Location-based systems will be required for some jobs. Permissions will be controlled by a business manager or IT administrator.
• A new generation of location-based applications will integrate with microblogging platforms.
• Web-oriented dashboard environments will provide live updates for managers to get an immediate view of their team with updates that are filtered to different communities based on the employee’s work role.
• Foursquare and Gowalla will be important for adoption but the first dominant player will probably be a new company or a company with an understanding of the importance of location-based systems.

These outcomes do seem plausible. In the current generation of Enterprise 2.0 applications, we see the emergence of similar trends. IT Admin is becoming a basic requirement for cloud-based, collaborative applications that serve the enterprise. We could name everyone here but just look at the latest crop of new arrivals. Both Novell’s Pulse and Status.net make this requirement standard in its microblogging applications.

How location based networks affects the way we view employees will become one of the most important issues in this brave, new world.

Enterprise data, bound together by data analysis, may become such a tightly woven fabric that recommendations can be made at each check-in. Suggestions about work habits may become part of the network. How we view our basic civil liberties will be challenged. But in the end, we’ll keep looking out two years, waiting for the next consumer wave while managing the reality of working in a transparent universe.

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We have talked about the power of utilizing social networks for businesses before in our Weekend Reading series with books like The Facebook Era, by Clara Shih and Crush It!, by Gary Vaynerchuk, and this week we’ve got another book under a similar vein. Published just last month, Social Networking for Businesses: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs, by Rawn Shah is a guide for companies looking to take advantage of the collaborative communities of social networks to improve their business.

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Author Rawn Shah has plenty of experience in this very subject as he is the Best Practices Lead on the Social Software Adoption Team at IBM. In Social Networking for Businesses, Shah breaks down the essentials and methods of modeling social experiences for businesses to get the most out of their users and customers. One of the most important factors to the success of social business experiences is the leadership of those experiences, says Shah, who points to the success of blogs and Wikipedia as examples.

“The success of each blog is a result of the leadership of its owners, who independently set the rules for what to publish and who can contribute,” says Shah. Wikipedia, he says, only succeeded when its leadership structure changed to let anyone to contribute, allowing the best content to rise to the top and be curated by public editors.

“This defining change in how people could make decisions on the content and direction of the site — a leadership model that allowed anyone to become an editor and leader — drove Wikipedia’s overwhelming success,” says Shah.

Other topics covered by Shah in his book include building skills to create and manage social experiences, building a social culture within your business, collaborating with customers and users on ideas, and measuring the results of social environments.

“Online communities and social computing software are rapidly appearing both on the Internet and within organizations as a means to allow people to collaborate, although quite frequently without a plan or a link to organizational and business value,” says Shah. “By framing collaboration around specific goals and methods instead of herding people towards generic ideas, social computing can help develop and direct innovative development in an organization.”

This book is a little more of a deep-dive than some of the other books we’ve recommended over the last several weeks. If your startup is looking to encourage unique social interaction between your users and your business, this could be a great book to check out.

Disclosure: A review copy of Social Networking for Businesses was provided to ReadWriteWeb by Pearson Education and Wharton School Publishing.

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Newsgator has acquired Tomoye, a social networking platform for Sharepoint. The acqusition makes Newagator one of the largest enterprise collaboration companies in the Enterprise 2.0 space and positions it as a vendor with the deepest ties to the Sharepoint environment.

Details of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition buoys Newsgator’s reputation as an enterprise collaboration provider, almost exclusively for the Sharepoint platform.

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Newsgator says it now has 2.1 million paying users, which it claims makes its the largest social computing vendor. It’s a claim we are a bit skeptical about as there are so many possible ways to define exactly what it means to be a social computing vendor.

Newsgator has always had deep ties with Microsoft. it began as a news aggregator that embedded into Outlook. In recent years, Newsgator has transformed into a collaboration provider. its focus is on Sharepoint. Microsoft seems to look kindly on Newsgator as a partner. In contrast, companies like Jive, that integrate with Sharepoint, are seen more as competitors.

The acquisition appears to give Newsgator deeper social networking capabilities but perhaps more so gives it a position in the Governmnet 2.0 world.

Tomoye was founded in 2000. Its most significant installation is with the U.S. Army, where it has 150,000 users. Customers include the Federal Reserve Bank, The United States Air Force and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

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Social search was in the news this past week when Google and Bing announced that they would be getting access to the Twitter fire hose. A flurry of subsequent posts speculated on what this “social search” would entail, and some expressed concerns over privacy and spam.

But social search is not something to be afraid of. It’s really just an extension of behaviors that we’re used to in the real world, brought online, thanks to the advent of real-time social computing.

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First, people have sought help from others for search problems and information-seeking tasks for a long time. Prior to the Internet, this was our primary way of getting information. We either asked a librarian to help us find something or, prior to that, we spoke to each other to spread information and seek help. We can reasonably treat this current trend in social search as a return to that familiar state.

Secondly, social search is no scarier than the Web itself. Social search will not make you easier to find. If you’re the type of person whose social network data appears in search results, then you’re already incredibly findable on the Web. Your tweets may reach more people than you want, but this also means that your ideas will be exposed to a wider audience, extending your reach and influence and presumably improving your brand. As before, if your tweets are currently open to the public, you’re already reaching more people than you know.

The very real issue of relevance, though, comes up when dealing with social search. Noise, false information and spam could dilute a set of search results and distract users from their quest. But spam is context-sensitive. Well-targeted ads aren’t regarded as spam; in fact, many people don’t even know the difference between Google ads and the main set of results. Same with search. A Twitter post linking to an article on diet supplements may be perfectly relevant in a query on “dieting tips and tricks” on Bing. In any case, finding spammers on Twitter should be relatively easy judging by the follower-following ratio or similarity of tweets.

Social search is also not a fad. It’s an improvement on limited algorithms that only index static pages. Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström remind us that we’re in a transitional state from a Web of documents (in which algorithms were sufficient for surfacing relevant data) to a Web of people (in which PageRank no longer captures what’s happening right now or happening among your group of friends). Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg reiterated this at the Web 2.0 Summit, saying that there is a “shift going on from an information economy to a social economy.”

Social search is one mechanism for leveraging the value in this shift.

So, as you get used to how companies like Google and Bing implement social search, think about how your community of Facebook friends, distant acquaintances in your Google contacts, nearby friends from location-based services and publicly bookmarked items might help you search better.

Guest author: Brynn Evans is a PhD student in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego who uses digital anthropology to study and better understand social search.

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At the end of his keynote on Monday at Sharepoint 2009, an interviewer asked Steve Ballmer about social computing. He recounted a story about a friend of his, a CEO for a Fortune 50 company. Ballmer said the guy is adamant in his opposition to social computing in his company. But if he had assurances that corporate data would be safe, then it might be a different story.

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It was an interesting end to Ballmer’s keynote. It was all Ballmer, yelling, practically, at the crowd to make his point about the ways the social web will make it into the enterprise.

Ballmer sounded like a guy rallying his troops. He kissed his fingers to his lips as if he were talking about a masterpiece. He then told the audience that after the conference they will be equipped to tell the Sharepoint story. And they will be the ones who bring social computing into the enterprise.

This may seem like arrogance to some but we are further convinced that Ballmer’s remarks do reflect the monumental fears that top management has about social services like Twitter and Facebook. But it is also important to look at what Ballmer says and temper it with the reality of the market.

Ballmer said that Sharepoint provides the path for social computing in the enterprise. It provides security, information management and compliance along with social features that allow people to communicate in the way they want.

For many steeped in the social web, it’s clear that the Sharepoint 2010 features look pretty basic. But for the enterprise user, the features may be just right.

For instance, Sharepoint 2010 uses a ribbon interface, which is quite familiar to most people who work in the corporate world.

Simple things do matter. People may now upload pictures from their computers to a Sharepoint site and then re-size the image. Sharepoint 2010 includes an activity stream for each user. Team sites are now wiki-oriented. Users may use wiki editing commands.

Search has been beefed up for people to find experts faster. For instance, if you are looking for a person with product sales experience, you can do a search with results showing the person’s profile, which shows notes, ratings and their activities.

Tagging is unified in Sharepoint. For example, in a profile you may see the tags that are associated with person who appears in your search results.

These are all fairly basic social features that are old-school to many people. But in many ways these features are just right for the mass market enterprise user. Plus, there are some capabilities to make the platform compelling. These include the ability to make mashups.

We know there are a host of other factors that will come into play and provide some advantage to the companies that provide social technologies. But the reality is that many of these smaller companies are working in Sharepoint to provide an additional social layer. NewsGator made an announcement today about its integration. Jive Software, which today announced a new $12 million in funding, integrates, too.

These companies are important to social computing in the enterprise. But it will be the big players that forge the path.

The major force is still Microsoft with Ballmer leading the way.

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