Does your company allow you to use personal devices?

[HardDrive]

I'm taking an informal poll. Does your company allow you to use your personal phone to access work e-mail? Do they allow you to use you personal number on your business cards?

I'm looking at the question from the perspective of an IT guy, and the challenges it brings. But it got me thinking about sales. Yikes. A person leaves for a competitor and.....

[Hugh R]

Yes and no. I own the cell phone but in order to get company email it has some company software. However, I can access my company email with a user name and password from any computer. My personal phone # is on my business card. Again, its a personal phone in that I own the phone and the phone number, and will take it with me when I eventually leave.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

I don't know about our sales staff but our engineering staff is allowed to. The amount of spyware that IT installs on your BYOD phone, though, is phenomenal. Stuff from disabling the camera within a certain radius of the facility to monitoring all in/out traffic. Because of this I chose to take the phone they provide by default (some sort of Samsung Galaxy thing) and carry my own personal phone as well.

As for business cards....not in the budget. I haven't had a card since 2003.

[mikesride]

My company provides the phone and covers all costs....they (as of yet) don't limit the amount of personal apps we run on them.

[chocolatelab]

We are provided a phone but can access our email via the " Good App " if we want to use out iPad and iPhone to review work email.

[mjohnson]

Employer-provided phone. Gub't issue Blackberry. Only those phones are allowed in the workplace, no personal electronics, period.

We can do email from any computer, personal or not. I don't think that there's a way to run the encryption software that we use on a personal PC however. We deal with lots of unclassified but tightly controlled information that has to be encrypted, so email from home is sort of useless. The phones have the encryption stuff, anyway, so I usually just use that.

Two of our peer DoE labs are permitting personal phones into the security areas, even into vaults. That really freaks me out. We permit our official phones into vaults by lab-wide policy but I guarantee that my vtr has a local rule prohibiting them.

You know that you can't turn a phone off without pulling the battery, right?

[ckelly78z]

My boss and associates know my cell phone #, but I refuse to let the IT dept download garbage to moniter my phone, location, activities, and correspondence. I don't use my phone much for texting or business calls, but I do require that my access to private areas and documents remain private to me only (I'm not cheating on my wife, or the business, and just feel it is none of their concern), so I pay privately for my phone.

[SilberUrS6]

I use my private, paid-by-me phone for stuff like staying in contact with my wife and kids, on an as-needed basis. I don't do company e-mail on it, nor do I use it for client contact. The landline phone at the office is for calls, and the computer at my desk is for company e-mail. Since I am not being paid to have 24/7/365 access, I refuse to accept a company phone. I told them that having round-the-clock access was not in their financial interests, and so far, they have taken me at my word.

[Bill Douglas]

Argh, I used to be a tech for a place that let staff buy their own stuff. Then they came crying to me when it didn't work and it was my job to make it work. All sorts of schit bought from places like Hong Kong that shouldn't even be in the workplace.

It's the IT departments job to decide what is suitable (and THEY can keep safe) and the company stick to standards.

[mreid]

We are BYOD. You bring the device and we pay for the entire service plan and provide a company App Store to download software that allows you to access and use all company data and technology. When you leave, we wipe the phone and turn off your access.

[M.D. Holloway]

Yes - basically I can use anything I want

[jyl]

I'm taking an informal poll. Does your company allow you to use your personal phone to access work e-mail? Do they allow you to use you personal number on your business cards?



I'm looking at the question from the perspective of an IT guy, and the challenges it brings. But it got me thinking about sales. Yikes. A person leaves for a competitor and.....

Personal smart phone can access work email, contacts, and calendar, using MobileIron.

Personal tablet can do the same.

Personal laptop cannot access anything.

No personal device can access network files.

[devodave]

Originally Posted by mjohnson

Employer-provided phone. Gub't issue Blackberry. Only those phones are allowed in the workplace, no personal electronics, period.

We can do email from any computer, personal or not. I don't think that there's a way to run the encryption software that we use on a personal PC however. We deal with lots of unclassified but tightly controlled information that has to be encrypted, so email from home is sort of useless. The phones have the encryption stuff, anyway, so I usually just use that.

Two of our peer DoE labs are permitting personal phones into the security areas, even into vaults. That really freaks me out. We permit our official phones into vaults by lab-wide policy but I guarantee that my vtr has a local rule prohibiting them.

You know that you can't turn a phone off without pulling the battery, right?

We have the DOE issued Blackberrys too. Our IT folks have said that we will never have BYOD. We (my co-worker and myself) are currently trying to obtain Govt-issued Note 4s (which can work with BES 10 or the new BES 12) since we spend the majority of our time out in the field performing operational oversight. The Blackberry screen is tiny and data entry is difficult at best - we use them to maintain our log/record.

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by mikesride

My company provides the phone and covers all costs....they (as of yet) don't limit the amount of personal apps we run on them.

Our newer Blackberries have "work" and "real life" partitions. One sends traffic to the BB servers, one tunnels somehow to our internal network. The "real life" side lets us use whatever apps we want - if only there was much out there in the BB ecosystem. The "work" side is seamless - as if I'm at my desk. It is really slick, though I don't know how it compares to the Good app for iPhones.

I'm moving to the apple product now that it's approved. It's a little more inconvenient as it can't ever be around certain types of conversations (I guess the BB version of "off" was more trusted) but if I've got to have a consumer-type product I want the one with lots of options. The old BBs (like 2009) were solid business tools. This recent one (Z30?) that I had was pretty flimsy with poor battery life and ergonomics more suited to facebook than email/work.

[aigel]

At a startup ... anything goes. As it should ... if someone wants to take every piece of information they have electronically available with them, it is fairly easy to do so in a normal industry setting. Now if we are talking top secret type jobs / information, that's a different story. But don't fool yourself in a normal company - if someone wants copies, they will have them long before they resign or are laid off.

I am not sure about sales guys - do they really have hundreds of contacts that they can't remember and could retrace from memory after they leave? I am a technical guy and I never take anything. I don't have to take records to remember my vendors and friends in the business. None of that is secret either anyway.

G

[M.D. Holloway]

G
Yes. Sales guys (the good ones) have hundreds of contacts. It can be tough to remember them all. I make it a point to at least drop a note once a month to say hi, touch base, maybe share a joke or something they are interested I'm. My targets and customers are important.

[mikester]

We allow it, they can wipe my phone but my contacts are all in LinkedIn and what not so it isn't an issue. My personal photos and what not though, I sync regularly and am not worried about it.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

I'm issued a laptop and a phone (Blackberry, yuk) but I use my own phone and laptop since they're better and more reliable. I just forward the blackberry calls to my iPhone which is always on my person and leave it in the car.

[epbrown]

Originally Posted by HardDrive

I'm taking an informal poll. Does your company allow you to use your personal phone to access work e-mail? Do they allow you to use you personal number on your business cards?

I'm looking at the question from the perspective of an IT guy, and the challenges it brings. But it got me thinking about sales. Yikes. A person leaves for a competitor and.....

We had two levels of access where I worked. You could take a company Blackberry and use that for work calls and e-mail. The truly elite had what we called remote access - they could also log with a company-supplied laptop. Logging in on other equipment, using your own phone? Nope.

[campbellcj]

Limited - we allow/encourage certain employees to have email access from their phones or personal computers. To do anything more, they can connect via VPN; however, not everyone is granted this security role/group, only those with "need".

FWIW you've gotta be careful at least in California with non-exempt (hourly) people as simply reading an email on the phone after-hours is considered working overtime. Most of our team with remote access or BYOD is salaried-exempt (software engineers and operations folks, or sales).