To start with, narrowing down your shopping list by considering the top players first. Top
players are the competitive leaders who understand the market with analysts and board customers recognitions.
Also pay attentions to the historical performance and time in the market. A long time product with a good history usually comes with solid experience, a richer set or features to cover more practical use cases and a well planned roadmap.
The next thing to consider is your preferred deployment model, SaaS or On-Premeises? Not all the vendors provide both options. This can further help you to focus on the right options by elimination.
A good UEM solution is more than just MDM, MEM and MAM. Is it an enterprise grade solution? Here are some of the criteria of a good enterprise grade solution:
BYOD/corporate/LOB devices. Make sure the solution can cover all your use cases.
True multi-tenancy: A good management framework allows you to manage your device fleet by any logical grouping. Also, each tenant should be able to connect to its own set of enterprise resources such as directory service, email infrastructure, PKI and etc.
Role based administration
Reporting. Enterprises require various kinds of granular report for operation. One of the examples is to use device count report to do cost sharing among departments.
Allow partners/contractors to enroll device. Some UEM solutions do not support non-directory account device enrollment as their design is to directory focus.
Good UI means user friendly and responsive.
In a remote working environment, users often need to connect to back to enterprise data. Tunneling is required in this case.
Make sure your choice of UEM comes with a per-app VPN which support all popular device types.
Does the UEM you look at enable IT to support remotely? Both IT and users are part of our remote workforce. A remote support tool became a core component of a anywhere workspace UEM.
Some vendors propose a separate peer to peer screen sharing solution which is not designed for UEM remote support purpose.
A good remote access solution for support is an integral solution. It allows administrators to search device and initiate remote session form the same admin panes. Working on the same UI also allows helpdesk to see all the device information including user info, device info, application info and device location while remote accessing a device. Administrator can also get policy and app pushed from console while controlling a device. This makes a remote support as effective as it supposed to be. See a demo below.
In case a vendor adopt OEM strategy, pay attentions if OEM components are integrated seamlessly. Or the OEM components are operated like it is not part of the whole solution with separate console? Take remote access as example, is it a OEM and separate solution which is not originally designed for UEM remote access?
How well does a UEM fit into your organization’s overall anywhere workspace strategy? In a remote distributed work environment, UEM cannot be stand alone anymore. Here are some of the major considerations. A modern UEM must be able to be integrated to different edge to provide features below:
User authentication
Device compliance
Enterprise resource access authorization
Conditional access
Single sign on
Remote desktop
End user experience
The capability to integrate with other applications such as collaboration tool (e.g. Office 365) and ERM (e.g. SAP) are crucial. At the end of the day, getting remote users to be productive is the ultimate goal. Please see the following two blogs for more details.
Finally is the vendor capability. Does the vendor have local coverage? Does the vendor demonstrate end to end solution knowledge? Or only offer a stand alone UEM product?
Many of us still take UEM as a commodity product but it is actually playing a bigger role than it appears to be in a anywhere workspace environment.
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