At VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, a lot of EUC updates were announced. Below are the key announcements for the specific product lines.
Overall pretty impressive work has been done in the EUC space to help and enable the end-users even more. Want to see more EUC updates, I recommend watching: Showcase Keynote: Becoming a Champion of Digital Employee Experience (DW3459KU) after reading this blog post.
New Workspace ONE Services:
- New Intelligent Hub Virtual Assistant uses IBM Watson and natural language processing to help answer simple employee questions via text or voice and includes Mobile Flows integration.
- Intelligent Hub Self Service expands on previous AirWatch / Workspace ONE self-service portal with a new Support tab with employee FAQs.
- New HR and ITSM integrations in Mobile Flows, including Atlassian Jira Service Desk.
- Workspace ONE Assist provides remote support based on the AetherPal acquisition now includes Windows 10 support with macOS coming later.
- New Digital Employee Experience Management service will provide monitoring, logging, and remediation when possible, across all devices. It will also provide a User Experience Score in a future update.
The Intelligent Hub powered by IDM Watson is amazing. Digital Assistants are now everywhere and are increasingly becoming an integral part of employees’ digital experience in 2019 and beyond. Ever wonder how digital assistants will impact the lives of employees from onboarding to offboarding? Join us to learn more about how Workspace ONE is integrating with IBM Watson to offer natural language processing (NLP) and AI-driven experiences in Intelligent Hub to offer better onboarding, self-service, support, and overall productivity. If you want to have more information on this, watch this VMworld Session: Enabling AI-Powered Workspace ONE Digital Assistant in Intelligent Hub (DEE3015BU)
Workspace ONE UEM updates:
- AirLift 2.0 will now be able to automatically migrate GPOs from SCCM.
- New Enterprise App Repository will contain select updated, tested, and pre-packaged commercial applications.
- iOS 13 support; support for User Enrollment will be in beta.
- Support for scripting and encryption lifecycle management on macOS.
- Support for migrating from legacy Android Device Admin enrollment to Android Enterprise.
- Chrome OS certificate management extension, and support for lockdown mode.
- Dell Technologies Unified Workspace supports Chromebook Enterprise.
- Workspace ONE agent persists even when Dell PC is wiped.
- Workspace ONE can sync directly with Okta Universal Directory (without AD).
Here for me, the biggest update is iOS 13 and the way it will change BYOD. End users will be pleased to hear Apple did some important iOS 13 MDM changes:
- MDM servers can no longer erase an entire device. Personal data is, therefore, better protected.
- MDM servers have no visibility over the personal side of a device. No personal third-party apps are visible to employers.
- MDM servers cannot clear the device passcode with the Unlock Token command (this change also means that MDM servers cannot help if a user forgets an enrollment passcode. As a tradeoff, only 6-digit, non-simple passcodes can be enforced).
- Supervised Mode restrictions have been depreciated and will eventually no longer apply to User Enrollment.
- No serial numbers or UDIDs are used to identify a device, instead of a separate “Enrollment ID” is created and used.
Horizon Updates:
- The Horizon Control Plane will sit above both Horizon 7 and Horizon Cloud. Giving you a real single pane of glass!
- Horizon Control Plane will support multi-cloud brokering, app management, lifecycle management, monitoring, and image management. It will be able to transform images for various infrastructure platforms. It will also take advantage of Universal Horizon License.
- VMware is planning a fully managed Horizon 7 offering on VMC on AWS. (We speculated on this after finding it in the session catalog.)
- Integration with NSX Advanced Load Balancer.
With the acquisition of AVI Networks, we get access to the NSX Advanced Load Balancer bringing a ton of new features to NSX load balancing. Where in previous scenarios with multiple Horizon pods you were kinda forced to use F5 for specific GLSB options, now you can use the NSX Advanced Load Balancer for those options. Want to learn more about NSX and how it helps with VMware Horizon, watch this VMworld Session: Horizon and NSX – A Match made in Heaven (ADV2549BU)
Workspace ONE Intelligence:
- New risk scores for users and devices, updated continuously and fed into access policies.
- New user behavior analytics.
- Trust Network integrations from Carbon Black, Lookout, and Netskope are now generally available.
Carbon Black is here the biggest triumph for the whole Workspace ONE suite. More info can be found in an earlier blog post specially on this subject. This security solution will help you secure your Workspace ONE environment even more from Virus, Malware or other kinds of malicious voodoo.
Still hungry for more?
All VMworld sessions can be found online now. Check them out here. Personally I recommend the following video’s and those can be found in the VMworld 2019 video catalog.
- What’s New with Workspace ONE?
- Enhance User and Device Security Posture by Leveraging Workspace ONE Intelligence
- Juggling Okta, Workspace ONE, and Office 365
- Mastering the Move to Windows 10 Modern Management with Workspace ONE
