App Manager - The Device Category

A Device refers to a uniquely identifiable computer, tablet or mobile phone that hosts a Digitise Apps Client. The following device types are supported:

Apple Devices

An Apple device running iOS. These devices are identified within App Manager as:

where <DeviceID> is a randomly generated case-sensitive 22-character alpha-numeric string.

The <devicetype> will be either iPad or iPhone as appropriate.

The Device ID is now linked to your developer account in the Apple Developer Enterprise Program or Apple Developer Program, which means that pre-configured Digitise Apps Clients and Standalone Apps which are signed with Distribution Certificates from different developer accounts will produce different Device IDs if run on the same device.

Under versions of Digitise Apps' predecessor MX, devices may have used different identifiers to those in use in the current version of Digitise Apps. In MX v10.0 or earlier, devices were identified as:

<devicetype>:<DeviceID>

where <DeviceID> is a unique case-sensitive 11 character string, except devices running a version of iOS earlier than v7, in which case they were identified as:

<devicetype>:<MACaddress>

If you want to find an individual device's Digitise Apps identifier, you can look in the Settings section of a Digitise Apps Client running on the device.

Devices must be registered with the App Server before they can use your Digitise apps. This can be done automatically or manually depending upon the setting in the Device Access option within the Server category Properties in App Manager:

Any Device

App Server will automatically add an unknown device to its list of known devices when the device first connects.

Listed Devices Only

The device must be added manually to the servers list by an admin within the Devices category of App Manager. Unlisted devices attempting to connect to the server, will be denied access.

Note that when adding a device manually, you will need to identify the device to App Manager using the appropriate identifier as described above, e.g. an Android device is identified using the identifier Android:<ANDROID_ID>. The device identifier is entered in the Serial Number field within the device Properties.

Once a device is registered with the App Server you can restrict which Digitise apps can be run on that device. You can restrict access by both device and user, if required, and you can give individual versions of the same app different access rights. Application access rights are configured within the Application category of App Manager. In addition, you can also block a device or user from accessing the App Server altogether and automatically delete existing Digitise apps from a device when it attempts to connect to the App Server (see below).

Selecting the Device category from the buttons in the lower panel of the left-hand pane of the App Manager window, provides access to settings and auditing of registered devices as well as being able to manually register them.

Within the Devices category, if you select Devices at the top of the tree view in the left-hand pane, the Properties and Audit tabs will display settings and auditing for ALL devices. Alternatively, you can select an individual device in the left-hand pane to switch the tabs to display the Properties and audit logs for the selected device only.

The Properties Tab

The Properties tab displays different information depending upon whether you are looking at all devices or a particular device.

For All Devices the right-hand pane displays a list of all the devices registered with the App Server, together with the following information about each device: its Digitise Apps identifier (Serial Number), registration method (Description), type of device, date and time of last activity, the last user and the device's name. Beneath the list the Add and Remove buttons allow you to add and remove devices from the list.

You can also display the Properties for an individual device from the All Devices Properties by selecting it from the list of devices and then choosing the Properties button.

For a specific device, the right-hand pane displays the Properties for that device only.

Denying Access to Devices and Automatically Deleting Digitise apps

The Security Action Property allows you to deny access to an individual device and also to automatically delete your Digitise apps from it.

This Property is located within the Properties for each individual device and has the following possible values:

None

Does nothing.

Purge Applications

The next time this device connects it will be sent a message to delete all its Digitise apps and associated data.

Purge Applications and Digitise Apps Install

On currently supported devices, this is equivalent to Purge Applications and will only delete the Digitise apps and data.

Deny Device Access to Server

Block access to the server for this device, but nothing will be deleted from the device.

Changes to this option will be downloaded to the Digitise Apps Client the next time the Client connects to the App Server to refresh the Applications list or to synchronise any data.

This option denies complete access to the device and is different to the Application access rights which allow you to specify which users or devices can run an individual version of an individual app. You can also block access to the App Server for individual users rather than devices, if required.

For a full list and description of all the Device Properties, see App Manager Device Properties.