The story of Motivate

The story

Motivate International Inc. operates one of the biggest bike sharing systems in the world. Based in New York, US, the company has its roots in Canada and Australia. Motivate operates about 9 bike share systems across the US. The system is so simple that any inexperienced rider can get the hang of it in the first few minutes of the ride.

The IT managers at Motivate International came up with a requirement for a solution that can manage the devices deployed to the employees in the marketing and operations department. The cell phones and tablets needed to be prepared for work and work alone. The system admin, Michael Passade, actively started looking for a suitable Mobile Device Management solution. Stopping at the names of the biggest vendors in the MDM market, he didn’t find the one that fitted his specific needs. That’s when Google landed Michael on the home page of Hexnode UEM.

The team wanted to manage Android devices owned by the employees and restrict them from using social networking apps or other apps for entertainment. They wanted the devices to run only work-related apps and disable the employees from installing other apps. The devices consisted of Samsung and Nexus phones and tablets. Not all MDMs supported these varieties of Android devices equally. Fortunately, Hexnode did.

Hexnode Kiosk offered everything Michael was looking for. The company had their own enterprise app that was to be installed on every device. They looked for an option to push enterprise app to the devices remotely and easily. Also, the company wanted their devices to have their own specific wallpaper. Hexnode was able to fulfil all their requirements.

The Android Kiosk Mode in Hexnode enabled Michael to lock down the devices to work specific apps. The Hexnode Kiosk Browser helped him to restrict the users from browsing unwanted sites from their devices. The device wallpaper settings could be configured remotely through Hexnode UEM. All the admin needed to do was upload the wallpaper image to Hexnode and then apply the policy to the device group.

The Android Kiosk mode enabled the company to lock down their Android mobile devices with work specific apps, websites and settings. Motivate’s own enterprise app called Citi Bike only needed to be whitelisted in the kiosk policy and the app would show up on the device. The user would have no option to skip the installation process. The kiosk mode allowed the admin to add websites as web apps in the device. With the kiosk secure browser, the user could open only the specified web pages. In short, the device was perfectly groomed for work very easily.

In a nutshell

The Kiosk mode proved to be the ideal solution for all of Michael’s requirements. The solution enabled him to restrict the device to company specific applications and websites and all these were done remotely. Thus, the device fleet was secured and configured for work, all at once with very less effort.