Handling handhelds

SECURITY ON handhelds is an issue whether you are the only person in the company using a wireless device or one of thousands. But management of handhelds only becomes an issue as the number of devices deployed in your organization increases.

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This is the philosophy behind mFormation Technologies ( www.mformation.com ) and of its co-founder Upal Basu. The company, based in Edison, N.J., offers management and system monitoring of mobile devices for some pretty big corporations.

mFormation's Enterprise Manager application installs an Information Agent on each handheld and has a Web-based server that runs on NT or Solaris at the other end.

So what does it do? Well, if you haven't received an e-mail you've been expecting for an hour, you can look into the server application to discover the cause of the delay -- anything from a battery issue on the device to a problem in the middleware or on the wireless network. "If you can isolate where the blame is to one physical entity, you can solve the problem," Basu says.

The server sends out a string of packets that travel throughout the distributed network to see where they start getting "sticky."

mFormation also offers some interesting security management features. The system can force users to invoke the password feature on their handheld. Password use and other polices are set on the server, and when there is an exception on the device, the Information Agent notifies the server in real time.

The server can also independently ping the client device. Using the wireless carrier's network, for example, the server can track the device's location. So if you've stolen the device, well, obviously you can run, but you can't hide. Plus, there are escalating levels of shutdown available to the mobile manager. For example, a manager can remotely lock the device from the server.

The final step is the dreaded Zap command, as Basu calls it. This is a measure not used lightly: The command deletes all the data, leaving only the Information Agent and the basic applications standing. Once zapped, the device has to come back to headquarters for rebuilding.

Another company worth checking out is XcelleNet ( www.xcellenet.com ), based in Atlanta. XcelleNet has been managing mobile devices for 15 years and has a very complete system management feature set, Afaria, to which the company has just added over-air synchronization.

Among the other neat features it offers, my favorites are check-point restart and byte-level differencing. With check-point restart, if the connection is interrupted during a download, Afaria takes up where it left off when the communication is re-established.

Byte-level differencing detects and extracts the difference between two versions of a file, then resends only the byte-level changes to the remote device.