Germany’s Rhein-Berg Caritas Association manages mobile devices and the necessary apps with Cortado MDM
With the Rhein-Berg Caritas Association’s motto being that “…People Count”, the social service provider strives to fulfill its mission as part of the Catholic Church, as an association of independent welfare organizations and as a member-based association. 480 permanent employees and many volunteers are active in various areas of welfare. To best support mobile employees, Torsten Keller, head of the IT department, was looking for a solution to manage mobile devices and distribute the necessary apps.
“I wanted something simple. Something affordable. Something that offered all the important features. And I wanted something from the cloud,” said Torsten Keller, outlining his wishes.
He found what he was looking for with Cortado Mobile Solutions and their cloud-based product Cortado MDM. “For me, it needs to be possible to set up a device in three clicks. And the Cortado solution offers that. No other product we looked at was so simple,” recalled Torsten Keller. His IT department, which has one full time and one half-time employee, simply didn’t have the human resources to deal with every single device for more than a few moments.
Currently, about 40 employees are equipped with managed devices. Android smartphones from Samsung are provided by the employer. So only those apps that are needed for work are used. Private use is not permitted. At the moment, employees working in homeless care and the addiction counseling service are equipped with managed Android smartphones. The rights are assigned to them according to user groups via Cortado MDM. The apps are also distributed to the respective devices via Cortado MDM. The caregivers working in the homelessness area, work for example with popular apartment search apps in Germany like Immoscout, eBay classifieds, and Kalaydo to find new homes for their clients. The Threema messenger app is used in the addiction counseling area. All apps must comply with the church’s data protection policy. According to Keller, this is even stricter than the EU’s GDPR. Additional apps such as Adobe Reader, public transport apps, Microsoft Teams, MS Office Lens, Office 365, Outlook, and Word were also rolled out to all employees.
Gradually, other operational areas, such as the nursing staff, are now being added. Here the app Snap! from Euregon is planned to be used. The total number of devices will then be brought to about 100.
All in all, installation with Cortado MDM worked out really well. The organization took advantage of the Cortado setup package and workshop. That was helpful, but the principle was clear anyway. There were only six buttons to press, and since the GDPR-compliant setup was already prepared by Cortado, it was easy to adopt. This meant that the solution also complied with the strict church data protection policies.
For employees, Torsten Keller had defined a standard start interface that only displays the necessary apps. This makes work easier for the employees. “We get a thank you for making the interface leaner,” he said. The employees are satisfied, and the employee representative body has no concerns either. They were involved in all processes from the very beginning, and their colleagues also took part in the Cortado workshop. Torsten Keller sums it up by saying: “Everything works great. It is as smart as I wanted it to be.”