Whether it’s BYOD or CYOD, companies going mobile all share one common challenge: the secure, efficient provisioning of smartphones, tablets and smartwatches for use by employees.
This setup process, however, can be a massive time suck that demands additional manpower and work hours — reducing the potential ROI of expanding mobile fleets. What mobile supervisors and IT administrators need is a tool for streamlining deployment. Samsung’s Knox Configure is that tool.
A cloud-based service for efficient, secure setup of Samsung smartphones and tablets, Knox Configure provides powerful, automated, remote device provisioning capabilities. With a free trial, you’ll soon discover for yourself how Knox Configure goes beyond traditional mobile device management (MDM) software to make your mobile deployment as quick and painless as possible.
Let’s take a look at features to try during your Knox Configure free trial.
1. Frictionless Device Deployment
With Knox Configure, you’ll be able to avoid one of the most time-wasting, expensive processes still common to IT: taking phones out of boxes to manually set them up for employees.
You’ll be able to automatically provision devices with Knox Configure while using your chosen device default settings (such as language, time zone, preferred Wi-Fi hotspots and data roaming). You’ll also be able to remove preloaded apps, also known as bloatware, which has been known to come with well-documented mobile security risks. This way, it’s the employees who get to take the phones out of the box for the first time — and start working immediately.
2. Assigning Devices
In the PC era, IT administrators created “gold master image” discs to install and configure computers before giving them to employees. With Knox Configure, you’ll accomplish something similar, but at a much more powerful, granular level. IT administrators can easily create and store different configuration profiles, each tailored to different employees, including their access level, corporate role, operating industry and more. That’s key: today’s employees are much less homogenous, and so are their mobile device needs. With Knox Configure, you’ll easily fine-tune devices, regardless of how they’re being used by employees and no matter what line of business they’re operating in.
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You’ll create device provisioning policies with Knox Configure and execute them in one of two ways: Enterprises can buy devices from resellers participating in the Knox Deployment Program, who work with IT to prepare and configure the devices; or, IT administrators can use the Knox Deployment App to verify device IDs so every piece of equipment receives the correct configuration settings.
3. Easy Device Enrollment
When employees turn their phones or tablets on for the first time, they want them enrolled in the corporate network quickly so they can begin working. Knox Configure makes that fast and easy. When the device is powered on, all of the policies you’ve set up for them using the Configure dashboard will be transmitted and enacted over-the-air via the carrier or Wi-Fi network.
You can also turn off unwanted setup screens from Google, Samsung and the carrier, and replace them with their own custom setup, using Knox Configure. Employees who are used to signing into multiple accounts, clicking through endless menus, downloading MDM clients or inputting complicated server URLs will be able to go about their business faster through this streamlined process. So will IT administrators, who now have newfound time as they address fewer support calls from stuck users.
4. Reviewing and Changing Device Details and User Logs
Knox Configure isn’t just to deploy and dump. The intuitive UI lets administrators review their employees’ device settings at a glance, and push out changes and updates to large groups of devices at once. The cloud-based tool lets you customize a wide range of device settings — more granular than MDM software, in many cases. Admins can configure the mobile network APNs used by devices and can create app whitelists or blocklists.
For added security or privacy, administrators can even turn off device cameras, microphones and screen capture capabilities. Even if they don’t force these policies, IT admins can review user logs to see which apps users have tried to download, which mobile APNs they’ve used and how many times they’ve taken photos or screen captures. Based on that information, admins can then reconfigure devices anytime via over-the-air updates.
5. Locking and Unlocking Devices
When devices are lost, stolen or identified as being compromised (such as when a user enters a password incorrectly too many times), security policies will lock them up or automatically reset them to the factory settings. You’ll have full control over security settings with Knox Configure. For instance, you can turn off the ability to use weaker PINs instead of passwords. Or they can change the number of times a password can be entered incorrectly before the device is locked or reset — and can update and enforce your chosen security configurations on devices over-the-air, even after they’ve been factory reset.
Providing powerful, automated provisioning tools to make the setup process as painless and easy as possible for employees and IT administrators is a clear ROI enhancement, and one that saves time and cost, boosting the productivity of all employees. In the journey toward a mobile-only workforce, softening the demand on IT teams for deployment and maintenance processes will allow for a focus on broadening the company’s technological footprint — a worthy investment.
Interested in trying Knox Configure now? Register for your free trial.
