Open Mobile Portal Reporting Enhancements

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011 Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing

We have talked a bit on the iPass blog regarding advancements we have made on the different client platforms out there, whether it is discussing our new Open Mobile for iOS client, the new look and feel of our Open Mobile for Macintosh client, or the granular policy controls we’ve enhanced recently for our Open Mobile for Windows client.

Today I’d like to draw attention to some of the great enhancements we’ve rolled into the Open Mobile Portal.

We don’t talk about the Portal that often, and we should talk about it more! The Portal has a tendency to just keep rolling out great releases a couple times per quarter that often get caught up with the different Open Mobile client releases. Behind every great ‘Control’ type feature in the Open Mobile client is the ability to configure it in the Portal.

Lost in all of this is the fact that the Open Mobile Portal is evolving into a great reporting tool for gaining insight into how mobility is being used across all mobile employees. Many people still think of iPass as helping users to connect to an iPass network, but did you know that in the Open Mobile Portal that we can show all of your Mobile Broadband data usage for those employees you have given a Mobile Broadband data card?

We recently enhanced our Mobile Broadband data usage report to differentiate between roaming and non-roaming users and to easily switch between a graphical view and a per user listing of Mobile Broadband data users.

You can see who are your heaviest users — those bumping up against usage limits as well as incurring heavy roaming fees — along with seeing those who are not using the cards you give out, so you can consider reassigning those cards to someone else. Historically, the Open Mobile Portal reports focused on the number of connections people make by type of connection, but another recent enhancements allows you to look at usage in megabytes, not just for Mobile Broadband as discussed above but for Wi-Fi, Ethernet and even dial users. You can then see who your heaviest users are in terms of usage across all access types.

As more of your organizations traffic moves outside of the corporate network- remote users accessing cloud applications is a perfect example, it is important to maintain visibility on who is making those connections, on what type of device they are connecting and the type of connections they are making. This is important for tracking productivity and costs of your increasingly mobile set of employees.

The nice thing is that the Open Mobile Portal is evolving along with your organization, providing the exact information you need to keep tabs on mobility across your organization. With the Open Mobile Portal rolling out releases several times per quarter, there is a lot more on the horizon that I can’t wait to talk about.

Are there other features that you want more details on? Leave me a comment, or Tweet back to iPass (@ipass).

 

Tags: enterprise mobility, Open Mobile Platform, Reports