Stage 3: Provision

Provision the application to supported devices along with any required artifacts. Provisioning techniques vary depending on the application.

Application provisioning activities include any steps that deliver, install and prepare the application to connect to SAP Mobile Server, and begin the application activation stage. Critical activity includes:

The distribution and installation of applications and runtime instances as required:
- (Optional) If you are using Afaria® with SAP Mobile Platform, include an Afaria client for devices supported by the mobile device management solution.
- An SAP Mobile Platform client runtime for messaging-based synchronization applications for Windows and Windows Mobile. No runtime is required for iOS.
The seeding of devices with security artifacts for mutual-authentication and encryption, as well as SSO. See Device Security in the Security guide.
The seeding of applications with initial application configuration and connection values.

Each of these activities are distinct steps that can be combined as needed to complete the application provisioning stage.

Application Provisioning Tasks By Device
Determine what application provisioning method is available for your device type. If you are provisioning applications to heterogeneous devices, SAP, suggests that you use Afaria.
Provisioning with Afaria
Enable a group of applications to be initially provisioned with a set of parameters from a provisioning file using Afaria.
Provisioning Applications with Configuration Files
In environments where Afaria is not used for mobile device management, you can use a configuration file to provision the device application on BlackBerry, Android devices, or Windows Mobile or Win32 devices. You cannot manually provision iOS clients in this manner.
Provisioning with OS-Specific App Stores
Different devices offer OS-specific app stores you may be able to provision devices with. Each store may have different requirements and limitations you need to accommodate before being able to post an application for self-service download.
Provisioning with Native Options for BlackBerry Devices
To provision the application to BlackBerry devices, you can automatically push the application to the device or send a link to device users so they can install it when desired. For small deployments or evaluation purposes, device users can install the application using BlackBerry Desktop Manager.
Provisioning the Public RSA key from the Messaging Server for MBS Encryption
If you are not using Afaria, you can install the client application, then connect to the corporate LAN using Wi-Fi or other method of your choosing in order to provision devices with required files. This allows you to seed public RSA keys to the device so that over-the-air connections to SAP Mobile Server can be mutually-authenticated and you can minimize the possibility of a rogue server intercepting your initial synchronization and providing its own RSA public key.

Parent topic: Mobile Application Life Cycle