VMware has had a ton of momentum over the last few weeks with our recent announcement of the intelligence-driven digital workspace with VMware Workspace ONE (check out our blog in case you missed it). As part of the momentum, I’m excited to formally announce the availability of Workspace ONE mobile flows. Through Workspace ONE mobile flows, our customers can offer a more productive, compelling mobile experience that empowers users to work across business backends from the most widely used mobile app, email.
It has never been more imperative to enable employees on-the-go. If you’re not investing in providing a compelling experience on mobile for your users, you’re already behind. Many organizations have already started the journey to a mobile-friendly workspace, but that is just the beginning.
Let’s say you’ve completed the first step – you’ve invested countless dollars into services across the business. How do you effectively bring these services to mobile? Will you be able to justify the ongoing investment of all these systems and services long term? Enabling business on mobile securely is not an easy task. Users typically use mobile apps in silos, or one app at a time, but work often spans across multiple systems; hence why working from a laptop or desktop is typically easier. Unlike actual work, the average mobile app only accesses one backend system at a time. Meanwhile, employees are demanding the same seamless experience working on mobile that they see using their personal apps.
To remove this barrier to success on mobile, organizations must enable employees to complete tasks and access information in-the-moment through use case driven workflows across many systems. Yet creating workflows for the enterprise is difficult. Workflows are often highly personal and must be tailored to a specific role or group within the business, making a “one size fits all approach” a poor strategy. Organizations must also have the bandwidth internally to build custom workflows that connect across systems and uphold necessary security requirements. To increase the complexity, security is usually not tied to user identity and is implemented in silos. This makes connecting multiple backend systems difficult at best, as each app can have different authentication schemes and security requirements that do not account for user identity and device posture. This cripples an organization’s ability to quickly and efficiently provide purpose-driven mobile apps at a pace the business demands.
“By 2020, over 50% of consumer mobile interactions will be in contextualized, hyperpersonal experiences based on past behavior and current, real-time behavior.”
-Gartner: Cool Vendors in Mobile App Development, 2017, Adrian Leow, Van L. Baker, Richard, Marshall, Jason Wong, Manjunath Bhat, May 2017
Workspace ONE Mobile Flows
The solution: Workspace ONE mobile flows. Mobile flows remove these complexities by enabling customers to quickly and securely deliver modern, workflow-driven experiences on mobile, in the app users statistically use most often: email. We’ve built mobile flows to make it easier for app developers to build meaningful, productivity-enhancing workflows into our proprietary secure email app, VMware Boxer. Within Boxer, mobile flows surface context-based insights and actions for the user, empowering them to get real-time information and complete tasks across business systems without leaving their email.
To make it easy for organizations to adopt mobile flows, we’ve created an open-source framework that walks developers through the process of configuring and implementing connectors. Within this framework, we are offering three options for those who would like to leverage mobile flows in their organization. This framework can be found on the Workspace ONE mobile flows GitHub.
- VMware Out-of-the-Box Connectors: We studied the most widely used apps and services across industries and are pleased to offer a group of pre-configured connectors for common use cases. See Figure 1.
- Tailor Out-of-the-Box Connectors: Easily alter one of our pre-configured connectors to meet a specific use case.
- Build Your Own Custom Connector: The name says it all. Reference our open-source framework to build your own connector with internally built services or other services we haven’t already pre-configured with. Note: Customers will typically see the highest ROI when they rethink an existing process, extending it to the mobile experience by surfacing consumable and relevant bites of information or transforming it entirely by building an action workflow to update records or make a change in a backend system.
Workspace ONE mobile flows implements a highly-scalable microservices pattern that empowers customers to rapidly develop their own contextual workflows for proprietary or purchased business systems. The mobile flows use cases above are a few among millions of possibilities when it comes to enabling your workforce on mobile.
Mobile flows are sold alongside Workspace ONE Intelligence. Interested customers should reach out to their account representative for more information. To learn more, visit the Workspace ONE mobile flows webpage or read our frequently asked questions document.
Stay tuned for a series of follow up blogs around Workspace ONE mobile flows to learn how we are extending the platform to deliver hyper-personal micro-flows to even more use cases and personalized application experiences.
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