Google Apps adds enterprise admin policies for iPhone, Nokia, and Windows Mobile devices

In a world focused on improving business productivity, companies look to solutions like Google Apps to provide employees with seamless access to information regardless of location or device. With the rising adoption of Internet-enabled devices, employees increasingly seek access to their email, documents, and other corporate data from their mobile phone.

Last year, we addressed this need with a number of enhancements focused on mobile productivity. For BlackBerry users, we launched the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server. For Android phones, we announced new web versions of Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as updates to Google Docs. We also launched Google Sync for iPhone, Nokia E series, and Windows Mobile devices, enabling Google Apps users to access and sync mail, calendar, and contacts from their mobile device to the Google cloud.

Tomorrow, we're expanding these capabilities further by launching new controls that enable administrators to help ensure corporate policy enforcement across a range of mobile devices.

With this change, Google Apps Premier and Education Edition administrators will be able to manage their users' iPhone, Nokia E series and Windows Mobile devices right from the Google Apps administrative control panel, without deploying any additional software or having to manage dedicated enterprise mobile servers.

These new mobile device management capabilities will allow administrators to:

Remotely wipe all data from lost or stolen mobile devices

Lock idle devices after a period of inactivity

Require a device password on each phone

Set minimum lengths for more secure passwords

Require passwords to include letters, numbers and punctuation

These features will be accessible from the 'Mobile' tab under 'Service Settings' in the Google Apps control panel. Once a user starts syncing their devices with Google Apps, the domain administrator will be able to remotely wipe device data, right from the user settings page.



These policies will let employees access their data from their phone while helping IT administrators easily control access to corporate data on mobile devices.

Stay tuned for similar features for Android devices like the Nexus One and Droid, and if you have any questions, please check out our help page.

Posted by Bryan Mawhinney, Google Mobile Software Engineer

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