We have come to discover that we have no meaningful way to manage the roll-out of the mobile app IFS MWO Maintenance. Since the iOS version comes from the Apple Store and the Windows version comes from the Microsoft App store, they just appear randomly on devices without any chance to vet the apps and keep all devices on the same version. Nor is there any mechanism in either store or from IFS directly to get any advance notification of upcoming version releases. There also appears to be no way of reviewing version releases with the associated release dates (not as important but still could be helpful if something breaks). I guess the assumption from all parties in this process is that newer is always better, but what if it is not? By the time we discover a bug, many of our devices will have the new release with no way to back-level the version. Does anyone else out there see this a potentially problematic?
Lack of management for mobile apps (eg. IFS MWO Maintenance)
+11Hi
What you can do is to introduce a mdm system on your side where you download the latest release app and have the possibiity to test it before sending it out to all your users. IFS do not yet have any predefined mdm solution, but are looking into it.
The predicted release date is usually every third Thursday each month, together with the SU release for IFS Cloud. Variation can happen depending if there is a requirement to get out the app between the two SU releases, due to critical issues for a customer.
We have Microsoft InTune currently managing iPads, but there does not appear to be a way to retrieve the app for a test group, while keeping it from going to the rest of the devices. I read an article related to InTune that stated the Windows version of these apps can be manually “saved” to an off-line location and deployed using PowerShell, but this seems to defeat the purpose of having an MDM in the first place? IFS sent me links to the “release notes” (for all IFS Cloud products), but I am having trouble interpreting these. We are currently running 24R2, SU2 (while testing SU16), but the release notes refer to SU19. I know that IFS states “fully backward compatible”, but we are still experiencing synchronization issues. And we still have no mechanism in place for timely (advanced) notification of these releases.
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