This is the fourth blog in the series on building custom MDM solution. In this blog, I talk a little in depth about the operation processing workflow and how it is used to determine ‘compliance’ of a tablet.

But why is ‘compliance’ important?

Compliance will tell the admin if a device needs any action or not. There are 4 states of compliance that a device can be in.

‘Compliant’ means no action needs to be taken. ‘Non-compliant’ means the device is not in the expected state. ‘Rooted’ means the device has been rooted and is open to manipulation. These devices should be acted upon urgently to avoid any misuse. ‘Unknown’ means the device has not been out of contact for a specific amount of time, in our case, it is 60 minutes. If a device is ‘non-compliant’, additional information is provided to help the admin resolve the issue.

So how do we go about determining compliance?

To understand compliance, we need to understand the categories of operations. The two categories of operations are ‘one-time’ and ‘persistent’. The one time operations are transient and help with diagnosis or maintenance of a tablet. Examples include ping the device to get its information, unlock the device, unblock the settings, reset the pin on the device. Persistent operations are the ones that define the expected state of the tablet. Examples include, contents on the tablet, password policy of the tablet, et al.

Only the persistent operations contribute towards the compliance of the tablet. If all the persistent operations are executed successfully by the tablet, it is said to be compliant.

As a side note, persistent operations are created for a group of devices, viz., a school, district, et al whereas one time operations are created at a individual device level. The composition of the group of devices can be static, students belonging to a school or dynamic, 6th grade students in a district.