Cortado unveils Corporate Server 7.2 with collaboration, productivity, printing and admin enhancements
Cortado, formerly known as ThinPrint and still perhaps best known for its printer virtualisation technology, has announced an upgrade to its Cortado Corporate Server (CCS) enterprise mobility management suite — from last year's version 7.0 to the new CCS 7.2.
Where CCS 7.0 concentrated on supporting iOS 7's business features, the focus of the new release is on mobile collaboration and productivity for users not only of iOS tablets and smartphones, but also Android — specifically Samsung Galaxy — devices.
Smart Sharing
A much-requested feature is Smart Sharing, a secure file-sharing-over-email system that has three tiers — secure link, public link and show link. With a secure link, an external recipient is sent a link, but to access the file, which is copied from the corporate network to a secure drive in the cloud, the recipient must set up a Cortado Workplace account connected to their email address. As David Moroney, Cortado's sales manager for UK & Ireland, Northern Europe and Africa, told ZDNet UK: "If they [the recipient] forward the link to someone else, it's useless." A public link is more open: the recipient receives an email link, which when clicked opens the file in much the same way as a Dropbox link does, for example. A show link, meanwhile, is for pasting into a forum, or a social media platform.
Smart Filing
Smart Filing, another important (and patent-pending) feature of CCS 7.2, seeks to maintain version control when multiple users are collaborating on documents. A timeline feature provides an audit trail of changes to a document, with support for roll-back to earlier versions and automatic file-saving to the original network location.
Native iOS Printing
Cortado's ThinPrint heritage and CCS's Active Directory integration is evident in the new Native iOS Printing feature, which makes all of your network printers available from any iOS application — not just the printers found by Apple's AirPrint. According to Cortado's David Moroney: "This is something that really distinguishes us from the MDM competition."
SharePoint Integration
Another much-requested feature is integration with Microsoft's SharePoint content management solution — be it on-premise or cloud-hosted — as a readable network drive from within the Cortado client.
Fast Enrollment
For IT managers needing to roll out mobile devices, Cortado has implemented a feature whereby a smartphone or tablet can be fully configured — with security certificate, MDM profile and Cortado client — simply by scanning a QR code with the device's camera.
Managed Apps for Samsung
Finally, CCS administrators can now push approved apps to Samsung Android devices, and determine which of these apps can access, edit and distribute corporate information.