Originally posted by Doug Drinkwater, TabTimes

The increasing number of smartphones and tablets in the workplace will push 25% of enterprises to adopt their own app store by 2017, according to Gartner.

In a new study, the research firm says that enterprises will increasingly turn to these app stores to control the apps their employees are using, especially with the bring-your-own-app (BYOA) trend now deemed to be “as important” as bring-your-own-device (BYOD).

2012 was a pretty big year, in terms of mobile and enterprise mobility. Look at just a few of the milestones that spring to mind in a quick mental review of the year’s biggest mobile headlines:

In my blog last week about the “Royal Family” of enterprise mobile app imperatives, I pointed out that in my opinion, “context is king.” Let me give you a simple example of where a little context could go a long way.

Recently, I was heading to an appointment and volunteered to look up the directions to make sure the driver was heading the right way. With my trusty iPhone 5, I opened the Maps application and input the address we were heading to, which soon revealed itself on the map. I then had to click on the destination, click on the “directions to here” choice, then choose from a list to select directions from my current location to the destination. What’s missing in this scenario is any concept of the context. I’m moving at high velocity toward the location I just entered, so why so many clicks to get the directions from my current location to be displayed on the screen? Why do I have to be so explicit about what I want when an app could pretty easily discern my intentions and just display the information I wanted?

Mobile application development is a “touchy” thing – both literally and figuratively. I mean it literally, in the sense that users generally let their fingers do the walking across your mobile app’s interface, which has some very interesting implications for your GUI (graphical user interface), and figuratively, in the sense that there are a lot of ways to go very wrong in the mobile development process.

I’ve had some limited experience in trying to design mobile apps, and a great deal of experience in using them. Very few apps that I download – and they must number in the thousands by now—pass the acid test of becoming permanent fixtures of my mobile experience. Most are “one and done” affairs, where I end up regretting the time I spent trying them out in the first place.

So here are four things that make a mobile app really stand out, from my perspective:

With more enterprises developing policies around mobile device usage, the role of the cloud is a hot topic. And why not? Any number of trends, issues and mandates suggest that its role will be significant—as in:

How actively are college students using mobile technology and what impact is it having on their learning experience?

Ongoing research suggests mobile technology is being deployed at a rapid rate to meet growing student demand. In the latest survey from the Campus Computing Project, more than half (55 percent) of public universities have activated mobile apps or stated their plan to do so in the coming year. That was up from just one-third (33 percent) the prior year.

The adoption of mobile devices among college students (and faculty) is leading to an increasing demand for mobile apps on campuses across the country. How you decide to deal with this opportunity can have a big influence on enrollment and how students perceive your college brand.

Students who’ve grown up as “digital natives” in a world of pervasive technology expect to use their mobile devices to conduct campus transactions and access an array of resources.

Windows 8 promises to be Windows re-imagined, but it’s important to know that the new Microsoft operating system comes in more than one “flavor.” Most notably, Microsoft is releasing Windows 8 on two processors—Intel and ARM—to maintain its enterprise footprint while trying to expand its reach into the consumer tablet and smartphone markets.

It will be interesting to see how organizations and consumers respond to both. “ARM and Intel have been trying to expand in each other’s market, with ARM chips making a push into PCs and servers while Intel increases its focus on smartphones and tablets,” notes a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

Although Windows 8, Windows Pro and Windows 8 Enterprise—the Intel-based editions—come with varying specs and features, they’re all fundamentally different from Windows RT—the ARM-based edition. (If Windows RT doesn’t sound familiar, though, you’re not alone. This edition was formerly called Windows on ARM—or WOA—until Microsoft renamed it.)

To help you pick the right OS for your enterprise tablets, we’ll compare Windows 8 and Windows RT in three categories important to IT leaders: legacy app support, software restrictions and hardware options.

The use of mobile devices on public sector networks is top of mind for most government agency and IT leaders. You can be sure that some form of mobile endpoint device is coming soon to the public sector—in spite of the security risks that keep agency IT leaders awake at night.

Don’t let security challenges derail your mobility plans, says U.S. CIO Steve VanRoekel, who warns IT leaders against making a “false choice between security and innovation.”

Indeed, federal mobility initiatives such as VanRoekel’s federal mobility strategy, General Services Administration’s (GSA) strategic sourcing plan for mobility initiatives and National Institute for Standards and Technology’s (NIST) security guidelines for tablets and mobile phones will pave the way—and set the expectation—for state and local governments to securely use mobile devices while meeting their organizational objectives.

Just last October, the U.S. Department of Defense approved an Android-based mobile OS for its military networks, and it’s not hard to see why.

With access to the Android ecosystem, members of the military will have access to information on their mobile tablets or PCs covering everything from high-level command and control programs to terrain data mapping.

Because Android is open source, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a custom build of the OS, called Security Enhanced Android, which was certified by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in October of last year. This build is expected to be the foundation for more, typically branch-specific iterations as tablets continue to prove their efficacy on the battlefield.

But in particular, tablets are showing great potential with two main areas of modern combat: situational awareness and remote troop management.