Great coverage of this topic is written up by Brian Katz: http://www.ascrewsloose.com/2012/05/24/do-you-need-a-mobile-ecosystem/ 

Pictures are on the Moprise facebook page. Press release on Coaxion at CTIA is here.

This video gives a sneak peek at a new, simpler user interface for Coaxion but you can get PDF conversion in the current Coaxion in the App Store.

However, in reality, everyone simply wants their Office documents on an iPad.  So using Microsoft’s own samples, I tried to view their documents on an iPad versus a PC.  For brevity, I won’t focus on Google Docs – it looks crappy, as Microsoft intended – but let’s sample the Microsoft Office Web Apps document sharing experience on an iPad.

The following video shows the Microsoft Web App experience on an iPad using Microsoft’s sample documents as provided in the marketing email.  You will notice Microsoft’s sample Excel spreadsheet on Safari in an iPad looks completely foreign versus the same spreadsheet displayed on a laptop (MacBook Air running Chrome in my case).  Making business decisions using these substandard views can be catastrophic.  This is why Coaxion’s document sharing technology automatically converts Office documents to PDF for fast, high quality viewing on iPad and iPhone.

The new Apple Configurator now available in the Mac App Store makes these basic tasks very easy and very repeatable, allowing an admin to give the device to a user and let them easily finish up the personal parts of the enrollment such as personal email address and passwords.

I was recently at the CITE conference (Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise) where BYOD in the enterprise was a key discussion topic.  Distilling the best practices from the corporate discussions, the following three rules rise to the surface to ensure mobile device security:

1) Have a consistent PIN policy and utilize Exchange & Exchange Active Sync.  This allows remote locking and remote wiping of devices.

2) Ensure employees report lost or stolen devices. When a device is lost, first lock the device remotely to give the employee a chance to find it. After a few days, remote wipe the device to protect corporate & personal assets.  A remote lock and then a remote wipe encourages people to report lost devices sooner than later as it allows employees time to find them. These remote locking & wiping features are available via Outlook Web Access as discussed in an earlier post so employees could take these precautions themselves.

3) Have employees sign an agreement that ensures they & you follow these guidelines when using a mobile device for work.  This ensures you have permission to erase their device and they understand you are balancing corporate security with preservation of their personal data.

Apple’s new Configurator makes rolling out iOS devices easy and if you don’t have a Mac in your corporation, buying one simply to use the Configurator will save you significant time and effort ensuring a consistent iOS security profile across all your users.

Before Coaxion: We encounter the following teams in our studies of document sharing:

1) A committee of 10 members supported by a staff member, want to meet and receive paperless documents on their iPads.

2) This committee archives their documents on SharePoint and is managed by a staff member.

3) Initially, committee members accessed SharePoint for their documents directly, requiring 10 SharePoint licenses.

4) Committee members required SharePoint training and support. Logging in, understanding the document hierarchy, and navigating the site on an iPad was cumbersome.

5) Staff members spent as much time supporting use of the SharePoint tools as they did preparing for the meeting.

6) This strategy required purchase of SharePoint licenses at $10 per user per month although access was only during the actual meeting.

After Coaxion: After upgrading to Coaxion, only one SharePoint license is required for a staff member. Committee members save time & money accessing just what is needed using Coaxion Reader on their iPads.

1) As before, the staff member manages the documents on SharePoint, ensuring integrity, proper filing, and correctness.

2) The staff member distributes digital copies of the meeting documents to all the committee members’ iPads using Coaxion. Committee members now see Microsoft Office documents with all original formatting.

With Coaxion, everybody saves. Committee members save time by not logging into and navigating SharePoint.  Staff members save time supporting SharePoint for people who simply need a few key documents. The business reduces SharePoint licensing costs.

Everyone hosts or attends “paperless meetings” where the documents are sent via email. It’s a painful process to find the email containing the documents and even more painful to switch between the documents in the email. Copying them to Dropbox can be laborious and once done, still doesn’t provide a good reader or offline access to quickly switch between them during the meeting.

With our latest update, Coaxion quickly turns email attachments into an iPad paperless meeting.  Simply Cc: or forward the email & attached documents to docs@coaxion.com.

For easy paperless meetings on your iPad, email documents to docs@coaxion.com

The next time you run Coaxion, a discussion will appear containing your documents for easy reading. The title of the discussion comes from your “subject” line. The documents will be inserted in the order they are attached – Coaxion automatically inserts any document named “agenda” in the front so that everyone can quickly access it.

Your emailed documents are instantly on your iPad for easy reading. Easily recognize the title and find the agenda at the head of the list.

Coaxion automatically converts your Microsoft Office documents to PDF making all the details readily readable. When you tap on a document, you can read it or navigate to other documents in a flash.  By tapping the “add person” icon, you can share the entire discussion & documents with your iPad-enabled colleagues in the meeting.   You can be a hero, saving your colleagues from manually exporting and importing their meeting documents.

Finally, when the meeting is done, close the discussion, letting Coaxion delete it from all the devices, protecting document confidentiality and keeping everything neat and tidy.

Paperless iPad meetings are easy with Coaxion.

Quickly navigate your documents and easily share them with your iPad colleagues, saving them time.

To see this first hand, here are some sample documents as viewed within email on an iPad compared to the same documents viewed within Coaxion.  This is a collection of slides in PowerPoint and pages in Word. The email display is on the left while Coaxion is on the right. The green exclamation mark was added to help surface the differences. You can click on any image to make it larger.

Even a casual examination of the documents shows how much easier it will be to hold paperless meetings using Coaxion over email – especially since you can forward your email with attachments to docs@coaxion.com for instant paperless meetings on Coaxion.

Some things that go missing include: Images, Headers, Footnotes, Charts, Axis, Watermarkers, and Formatting.  This means you will miss important data like your sales projections or key details on a contact.

Here are some sample pages when viewing native Office formats in email vs Coaxion. The green ! indicates missing graphics and incorrect formatting in the documents viewed before PDF conversion.

As viewed in email or a typical iPad PDF reader:    As viewed in Coaxion for iPad: