Touchdown for Mac allows users and IT administrators to enjoy the same level of security on their Mac device as they do on their iPhone, iPad or other mobile device. says Ron Goins, Chief Operating Officer of NitroDesk Inc.
Bellevue, WA (PRWEB) November 12, 2013
Push Email against corporate exchange servers has been available for many years on mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. However, the same level of usability and instantaneous email synchronization is not something Mac users have had access to for a long time. Now TouchDown for Mac provides corporate users with a secure, manageable and seamless experience for accessing their corporate exchange data on their Macintosh computers.
“Touchdown for Mac allows users and IT administrators to enjoy the same level of security on their Mac device as they do on their iPhone, iPad or other mobile device. In fact, in conjunction with our MDM/MAM partners, it provides much more flexibility in managing the device and the corporate data which is synced. As laptops become smaller and lighter, the distinction between what constitutes a laptop and a “mobile device” becomes almost non-existent. Touchdown for Mac provides superior security, manageability and user-features which simply can’t be found anywhere else. With this solution, IT can effectively separate enterprise data from the user’s personal data on the device, ensuring their BYOD programs are both secure and flexible, even for those industries—including financial services, legal, pharmaceutical and healthcare—with strict privacy and compliance requirements,” says Ron Goins, Chief Operating Officer of NitroDesk Inc.
TouchDown for Mac draws from all of NitroDesk’s experience developing ActiveSync clients on other mobile platforms like Android, iOS and Windows® 8. The advent of very portable MacBook computers have blurred the lines defining what is considered a mobile device; while most corporate security departments think of mobile devices as either a smartphone or a tablet, loss of a highly portable laptop computer can pose far more severe security threats than that of a smartphone. To make things worse, state of the art desktop email solutions leave a lot to be desired when it comes to enforcing common security measures such as containerization with encryption or restricting application level access using a PIN.
Trojans, viruses and worms have been touted as credible threats to data on mobile devices. However, with the lack of containerization on traditional platforms and the fact that most corporate data and emails synchronized to such platforms are available in the clear on the file system, make desktop email far more vulnerable to side-loaded trojans and viruses.
TouchDown for Mac connects to corporate Microsoft Exchange Servers using ActiveSync, and thus can retrieve the same enterprise security policies that are utilized to secure mobile devices. It allows enterprises to enforce encryption of both emails and attachments as they are stored in the container. The PIN policies that enterprises enforce in ActiveSync also result in the application requiring the user to enter a PIN to gain access to the application on every restart of the computer or prolonged sleep periods, without unduly interfering with productivity.
TouchDown for Mac also strives to make the data as accessible and usable as possible by providing a unified single window with separate areas for Emails, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes and Settings. This allows end-users to switch between views easily while providing them with the ability to open new windows showing specific data items as well as multiple windows with different calendar views.
More and more users and organizations are securing Emails using S/MIME certificates these days. TouchDown for Mac ensures the security of the users certificates by importing them into the encrypted container before they can be used for signing or decryption of sensitive emails. This ensures that the private keys of such certificates are not exposed in the keychain, thus additionally securing them. TouchDown for Mac also allows the user to selectively sign or encrypt data on a per-message basis for additional flexibility.
Information Rights Management (IRM) is a Microsoft technology that allows enterprise users to set restrictions on protected content and emails. TouchDown for Mac enables end users to protect outbound emails with IRM policies as well as view IRM protected emails while enforcing controls such as preventing forwarding of emails, copying content from emails, modifying email recipients or printing emails.
NitroDesk has also ported over some innovative usability features from our other platforms such as speech notifications, creating tasks and events from emails, email categorization and flagging, and customizable HTML signatures etc. to name a few. In order to provide users with the ability to manage large amounts of emails and other information, TouchDown for Mac also includes standard capabilities such as conversation views, filtering of emails and tasks, flagging of emails as well as categorization of emails and other content.
Pricing and Availability
TouchDown is now available in the Mac AppStore and is priced at 29.99 USD. Users can download a 30 day trial version of TouchDown and then activate the application by purchasing a license key directly from NitroDesk’s secure web site at http://www.mactouchdown.com.
About NitroDesk Inc.
NitroDesk was founded in March 2008 because of a desire to create an incredible, secure, mobile email client. Soon after the first Android phone was released in October 2008, NitroDesk released the first version of TouchDown™. NitroDesk continues to push the envelope of technology, building and shipping features, which go beyond the competition’s offerings.
Brand Name Disclaimers: Microsoft, Exchange, ActiveSync, Android, iOS and Macintosh may be trademarks of respective owners. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.