Last year the company I work for looked into BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Due to some major organisational changes the project was put on hold, though there are plans to bring it back to life later this year.
In a nutshell, the company will give each qualifying employee a sum of money and the employee purchases a computer/device of their choice. The employee owns the device but is expected to use it at work for work-related activities. The fine details haven’t been ironed out yet such as who qualifies, how much each employee receives, how often the payment is made, who provides support, etc etc.
From a technical point of view, a virtual machine will run on the device. The virtual machine will be set up with a work-configured Desktop which has all the relevant software already installed. This way the employee doesn’t have to purchase software licences and any work related file will remain in the virtual machine and be saved back to a server when the virtual machine (or physical device) is shut down.
From a training point of view, it’s going to be interesting. I can just see somebody coming for an Excel training session and asking “what do you know about this app on the ipad?” or “can you help me with this Mac problem?”. For me, that’ll be no problem at all.
Do you or any of your clients have a BYOD scheme? Does it work well? What are the pitfalls?