Manage Your Mobile Devices with WSO2 Device Cloud…
WSO2 offers several cloud services with their new product verticals including, API cloud, Integration Cloud and Identity Cloud. The latest addition is Device Cloud.
The WSO2 Device Cloud is powered by WSO2 IoT Server, which is an enterprise grade platform for IoT Solutions which supports several device management features and has the native support for Android, Windows and iOS platforms. (Currently Device Cloud only supports Android and iOS) Other than device management, Device Cloud also supports, User and Role management, Device Grouping and Policy management.
Advantages of WSO2 Cloud.
Before we go further in to the discussion, I’d like to quickly give some insight on the advantage of using WSO2 Cloud offerings.
As mentioned earlier, WSO2 offers four main Cloud Services, which are based on award winning WSO2 products.
Ability to use multiple cloud services and implement a complete solution.
You can try all the cloud offerings for a time period of 14 days free of charge. If you think you need more time to play around and evaluate, you can extend the trial period as well. Cool! Isn’t it?
Find out more about WSO2 Cloud: http://wso2.com/cloud
OK. Let’s get started….
If you do not have a WSO2 Cloud account yet, go to this link and create an account. You have to give the email address and follow the instructions in the email. (You basically create your organization, (which is called a tenant) and login to that organization. Also you can manage multiple organizations as well)
Once you have successfully created an account and logged in to WSO2 Cloud, you can see the cloud offerings that you can tryout.
I’m going to go ahead and click on Device Cloud to get started.
All the cloud products support Single Sign On, so that you do not want to login to each cloud separately.
We can see the features that are supported by Device Cloud.
- Devices : Manage all the devices that are registered (enrolled) to the Device Cloud.
- Groups: Create and Manage device groups.
- Users: Manage users. Not like standalone version of IoT Server, user management is done by WSO2 Cloud. Refer this documentation for inviting users to your organization.
- Policies: Create and Manage policies.
- Roles: Manage user roles.
Let’s enroll a new device.
Click on Add button in Devices Section. You can see the supported device platforms. Also you can see there is a virtual android device that you can try if you do not need to enroll a real device.
- Here I’m going to enroll an Android Device. So click on Android to go to the enrollment section.
- To enroll a device to WSO2 Device Cloud, we need to install a device agent, which handles communication, device management operations in device. You can scan the qr code to install the agent through Google Play store. Install and open the agent to start the enrollment process.
- In the app, enter the username and password that you used to login to Device Cloud.
- Next, you will be prompted to select the organization, which the device should be enrolled to. Select the organization and click.
- Then the WSO2 Policy Agreement will be shown. Click on Agree to continue.
- Next, the app will ask for some permissions. Click on Allow for all the permissions.
- You will be prompted to set a pin code for the app. Enter a pin with minimum length of 4 numbers.
- In next step, click on Activate to activate the device administration via wso2 agent app.
That’s it. If you have followed the above steps correctly, you could see the following screen on the device.
Now, the device is successfully enrolled. Let’s look at the server side and see what we can do in there.
Go back to Device Cloud home page. Now, in Devices section you can see a device has been enrolled. Click on View button to view the device.
You can see the enrolled device is listed in the UI. Let’s go ahead and click on the device to view the device details.
There are several sections in this Device View page. Let’s dig in to each section very briefly.
Device Overview: This section shows the common device details. Such as model number, IMEI number, Device ID, Device Status etc.
Operations: The list of operations that can be triggered on this device.
Device Details: Other device details. Battery level, Memory etc.
Policy Compliance: Details on applied policies.
Device Location: The current location of the device.
Installed Applications: The list of apps that are installed in the device.
Operations Log: The list of operations that has been triggered on this device.
Triggering an Operation on the Device.
OK. We have successfully enrolled our device with WSO2 Device Cloud. Now, let’s trigger a simple operation on the device and check what’s happening.
(More details on device operations will be covered in a separate article.)
I click on Ring button in the operations list and click Send to Device in the dialog box.
Great!
Now we have our device enrolled with Device Cloud and we can manage it.
I hope this article will help you to get started with WSO2 Device Cloud. More details on Device Operations and Policies will be covered in the next article.
Cheers…
