4 Part IV n Development Building an App Catalog When it comes to building an application catalog, many different approaches can be taken. Of course, a catalog is not required in order to deploy an app, but as most enterprises begin to mature in their mobility strategies, their portfolios of applications will almost certainly contain more than one app, whether available publicly through the App Store or privately deployed over the air as in-house enterprise applications. Your app catalog can be a combination of links to over-the-air installation packages of enterprise apps as well as to the iTunes App Store. This is important to recognize, since most enterprises will have a combination of internal and off-the-shelf applications (as discussed in Chapter 5). The app catalog can provide a similar experience to Apple’s App Store, but can also provide a company-branded experience to both custom in-house apps and listings of company-approved or recommended apps. Also, as described in Chapter 5, there is currently no way for companies to buy bulk versions of paid applications, but as a workaround most enterprise software vendors are taking the approach of making the client iPad application free through the App Store, with the server or cloud-based service licensed separately. In any case, app catalogs can either be Web Clips (which can be deployed over the air via confi guration profi les and pushed via mobile device management (MDM), providing icons that link to HTML-based web apps, or they can be native enterprise apps. If the app catalog is delivered as a native app (as shown in Figure 19-1), the user must install it by clicking on a link (in e-mail, short-message service (SMS), or a web page) and accept the installation when prompted, as opposed to the Web Clip approach that can be “pushed” to the device via confi guration profi les and MDM in the background, without requiring any user involvement. Using Over-the-Air Deployment While Apple’s documentation focuses on the fact that over-the-air deployment works with the Enterprise deployment model, this same process works exactly the same way with the Ad Hoc deployment model. This process is facilitated through a custom URI scheme called “itms-services,” which stands for the iTunes Music Store Protocol. Under this custom URI scheme, the user navigates to a URL with a query string parameter of “action” that is set to “download-manifest” and another query string property of “url” that is set to the fully qualifi ed URL of the application’s PLIST-formatted XML manifest. The user will be prompted with a screen requesting permission to install the application. Copyrighted Material. Not for Redistibution. Copyright © 2011, John Wiley and Sons.
