RoughlyDrafted’s Daniel Eran looks at “what IT managers will need to consider when determining how to deal with the iPhone, what its limitations are, and how things might change in the future.”
There are a number of issues involved with mobiles in business environments:
• securely delivering email to and from devices
• delivering push email
• integrating with a corporate calendar system
• integrating with custom Intranet applications
• provisioning and revocation of mobile devices
Eran writes, “The only corporate email systems incompatible with the iPhone are those that are incompatible with Internet standards.”
Full article here.
The article (And MDN’s quoted portion) is correct, but not right.
Of course your corporate e-mail system *can* use IMAP and POP to get your mail to you. The question that all these pundits seem to want to ignore is whether using those standards is the best decision for that company. It is often NOT.
And as the author acknowledges in the article, there’s no wireless calendar support, which is still a minimum requirement for any serious mobile connectivity application.
They’re getting close, and there’s still another day for surprise revelations. Here’s hoping the rumor about licensing MS Direct-Push / ActiveSync is true!
FTA: live access to their inbox via Exchange’s Outlook Web should be serviceable using the iPhone’s Safari web client.
::shudder:: OWA in Safari on a desktop is already awful. I can’t imagine all the zooming in and out trying to use it in miniature.