Making MEAP Real

Posted February 1, 2010

After all the logical diagrams of Microsoft MEAP and spelling out how it meets Gartner’s critical capabilities, I thought I’d show you a picture that provides a more concrete view of what our MEAP offering looks like. Hopefully, this will better crystallize how Microsoft lines up with those critical capabilities and how our reusable mobile application platform plugs into a customer’s enterprise. I think we have a great story here that shows customers how we can save them money on a platform that:

1. Works the same across laptops, tablets, Netbooks and phones.
2. Gives them reusable mobile middleware that can support multiple simultaneous applications rather than needing something different for each point solution
3. Lowers risk to their projects by reducing the amount of custom code needed to build any given solution.
4. Gives them adapters that plug into the existing enterprise packages they use to run their business.

Regards,
Rob

About Rob Tiffany

A bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction books, Rob Tiffany combines his military past with his high-tech present to take readers from the depths of the ocean to the world of mobile apps. Rob served with the Navy SEALs (SOCOM) on a special ops delivery vehicle and patrolled the seas on a Trident submarine. Beneath the waves is also where he taught himself to become a Software Developer with REXX on OS/2 and Visual Basic on Windows. After the Navy, Rob spent most of his career as a serial entreprenuer and an IT executive. A pioneer of the Smartphone revolution, he drove the development of the all-important mobile app ecosystem. As a Software Architect at the world’s largest software company, he’s in-demand as an advisor to executives and a speaker at conferences all over the world. Through books, articles and workshops, he helps to empower developers and IT professionals in areas of mobile, wireless, data replication, the cloud, and highly-scalable infrastructures. Rob lives in the Pacific Northwest and you can learn more about him by subscribing to his blog and following him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/robtiffany.

Nitin Garg, Bangalore

The main obstacle I see in Microsoft MEAP is dependency on number of softwares and moreover these do not seem to be tightly integrated. So both design and development is a challenge. Above all, it is just for Microsoft enabled devices. There are very less enterprises in the world who are solely depend upon Microsoft devices.
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Mr. Tiffany,

I am curious as to how MEAP will evolve to support Windows Phone 7 and Windows Embedded Standard 7 devices? Especially because there seems to be very little concrete information that the Windows Phone team is sharing about enterprise management of WP7-handsets and private application deployment to the same.

I’m also concerned about the lack of SSCE in WP7 and how I could work around it to allow usage of structured data-heavy enterprise applications in enforced connectivity dead zones. (e.g. planes, radio blackboxes etc.)

I can’t give you specifics about my organization here but it is a higher-education institution with 5k+ managed PCs while mobile is in its infancy (currently considering/prototyping iPhone apps).

Budgetary constraints prevent folks like me from attending TechEd etc. this year. Also why we’re piloting more open-source products like Zimbra etc. and consciously switching away from integrated Microsoft solutions.