Hi all,
I wonder how many other SMC admins out there:
A. are aware of this "as designed" behaviour
B. think that this is a poor design
When the Sophos Mobile Control iPhone app is installed, the default notification style is set to 'Banner'.
Therefore when a message is sent to the SMC iPhone app, a banner pop-up appears at the top of the iPhone screen, alerting the user to the message, and very quickly dissapears again. This behaviour is designed by Apple, but this is not...
- When the SMC iPhone app is openand on the 'Messages' tab, any messages received from the SMC server should be displayed in the 'Messages' tab.
- When the SMC app is open but is on any other tab, or if the iPhone is locked, you should receive a notification saying "The SMC client has received a text message". The messages are only displayed in the SMC app if the user taps on the notification, not if they manually open the app and go to the 'Messages' tab.
So unless your users immediately click on the banner notifications to open the SMC app, or have the SMC Messages section constantly open and active in the app, then they will never get to see the message/s!
Of course you could manually (try doing that on a considerable number of phones) change the notifications style from Banners to Alerts, but this is not bullet proof...
When the Alert notification is displayed on the screen and the user chooses to close the alert instead of open the alert, then once again, the message to the SMC app is lost forever.
So in order to make use of the SMC messages functionality you have to ask your users to either:
A. Constantly have the SMC iPhone app open and the Messages tab selected, and when I say constantly I mean constantly. You won't be able to use any other app as that means it won't be active. ;)
B. Ask your users to carry the phone wherever they go and constantly look out for messages banners and click on them immediately. They'd better be quick - real quick!
C. Change the notification style to Alerts and tell the users to only click Open when prompted. Clicking anything else will mean that the sent message simply vanishes!
D. Choose to send a text / AKA "SMS" message to the phones when you wish to notify theusers (Sophos's words not mine)
However the later doesn't work as a TextSms in Sophos's eyes (as tested) is actually a message to the SMC app and not a true SMS message.
I for one am shocked at how this even got past the design stage, let alone product testing - it is far from usable.
So I propose that Sophos speed up the release cycle of the SMC iPhone client app and release an update to greatly improve the messaging functionality. Not wait a year for SMC 5.0, which is scheduled for 2015 Q1.
Perhaps Sophos could even add the funtionality of a message overlay icon on the SMC iPhone app when there are unread messages?!
Sophos, as a last resort you could always get Oleg to upgrade the messaging side of your app: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/05/27/apple-ransomware-strikes-australia-pay-oleg-100-or-else/
Poor, poor, poor!
Over and out
John
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