“In less than a year, the iPhone has won the hearts of users, who speak of the combination cellphone, Internet device and music player with reverence,” Ben Worthen reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Indeed, the iPhone, which maker Apple Inc. says has captured 28% of the U.S. smart-phone market, seems to be loved by everyone — everyone, that is, except those who work in corporate information-technology departments,” Worthen reports.
“Designed with the consumer in mind, the iPhone is less secure than business-oriented smart phones such as those from Nokia Corp. or Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry, according to IT professionals. But that isn’t stopping people from using the device for work-related tasks such as checking email, managing sales contacts and getting information about prospective clients. In fact, market researcher Nielsen Co. estimates that one-quarter of iPhone owners over the age of 18 pass their phone bills on to their employer, suggesting significant use of the device for business,” Worthen reports.
“Many IT groups have banned the iPhone from their workplaces, complaining that there is no way to force employees to protect their iPhones with passwords and that they can’t erase sensitive corporate data from remote locations if the device is stolen or lost. Additionally, they say the iPhone doesn’t support the software many businesses use and that it only works on one cellular carrier’s network,” Worthen reports. “But keeping the iPhone out of the office may be a losing battle. As a result, some technology experts say the iPhone could usher in a change in the way businesses adopt new technologies.”
Worthen reports, “As Beth Cannon, the San Francisco-based chief security officer for Thomas Weisel Partners Group, says: Even after she explains to people why her IT department can’t allow them to use the device, they ‘still want to use their iPhone.'”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Mike in Helsinki” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s iPhone 2.0 software, scheduled for release this June, will include new enterprise features such as support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync to provide secure, over-the-air push email, contacts and calendars as well as remote wipe, and the addition of Cisco IPsec VPN for encrypted access to private corporate networks.
From the article
“In addition, even though Apple intends to set up a private section of its new App Store — the service through which people download applications for their iPhones — for business, Mr. O’Berry and other chief information officers don’t like the fact that they would have to go through Apple to distribute in-house software to employees. That means giving Apple access to their computer code, which some are reluctant to do.”
That’s something that’s going to annoy people. It would be nice if you weren’t forced to get all your apps from Apple. People will still be jailbreaking iPhones for the foreseeable future as a result…
@Bluefin-
I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked in IT for over 10 years now, and I have a hard time agreeing to this:
1. The user is always right. If there is a problem with the use of the system, the system is the problem, not the user.
Let me explain why. At a previous job, one of my coworkers called me for help with his PC. It had frozen on him and was completely non-responsive. It would respond to <CTRL><ALT><DELETE>, and the cursor was not moving at all with mouse movement.
I told him to power cycle the machine and that I’d be by in a few minutes to take a look at it. When I got there, he said that he had turned the computer off, and then back on, and that it was still frozen. Indeed, the computer was still frozen. He demonstrated what he did, by turning the display off and on.
Another employee at that job had taken it upon himself to upgrade the RAM in his computer (it was an Apple PowerMac 8500). The problem was that he used a pair of plier to force the chip into the slot, and damaged the chip (he essentially crushed a couple of IC’s on the stick). He opened a helpdesk ticket asking why his computer was only showing 96MBs of RAM when it should have been showing 128MB.
In another example, at my current job a few years ago, I had a user call to request training. I asked her what type of training she needed. She replied that she did not know, just that she needed training. She did not seem capable of understanding the idea that I would need to know what type of training she needed.
When you have users at that skill level, it’s not very helpful to say that “the user is always right.”
Some iPhone toting VP should get Beth Cannon a basement office, I bet she would change her tune.
Here is what everyone has missed about iPhone 2.0.
Remote wipe is great if the user knows that the iPhone is missing. What is really needed is encryption. That would be relatively easy, you might think. Apple just has to enable FileVault. But Apple did not talk about encryption or FileVault!!!
Why not?
Well, maybe because, as Jobs said, the event was about software not hardware! Hmmm…. Hardware for encryption? What could that be?
How about fingerprint recognition?
Touch!
Apple is a fortune 100 company, renowned for secrecy and security. They seem to be doing pretty well with the iPhone enterprise rollout.
@AnotherITGUY:
“As for the User’s Bill of Rights, when users are smarter than the equipment they’re using, then they can have some rights.”
Fscking pinhead! It’s fools like you who prevent me from getting anything done in a reasonable amount of time, and without approval from 4 layers above. Can’t install software, can’t use the USB ports, can’t SFTP through the firewall, can’t receive email with attachments, etc, etc, ad nauseum. I am so tired of jobs that should take 2 hours taking weeks because of really stupid security policies. At one employer (30,000 employees) we were locked out of the web entirely, and so we couldn’t shop for materials on line, we had to use paper catalogs. The web was locked but Telnet was not, and I could use it from any machine without even logging in, go figure. I could also log in as a networked printer and do anything I wanted to. We recently lost tens of thousands of dollars because we could not get a patch through the firewall to the server that needed it due, you guessed it, to SECURITY!
The attitudes of IT drones who know little beyond what they had to regurgitate to get an MSCE is insufferable. Comments that demean the intelligence of the average worker who is simply trying to be productive say a lot about the inferiority/superiority complexes exhibited by many in the IT service industry. And I might point out that it *IS* a *SERVICE* industry, you moron.
@shiva (and all the other nazi IT people):
I cringe listening to your so called eye rolling attempts a rationalizing the inflictions you make people go through.
Gosh, someone who disagrees with the “user is always right” concept. Obviously this sort of thinking is right down the lines with the law of demand and supply (as opposed to the law of supply and demand).
Yup, that’s IT for you: “You will demand what we supply, if we even decide that you are deemed worthy of it.”
Let’s look at this farce one step at a time.
1. (Employee reboots machine by turning monitor on and off).
On on off buttons everywhere, backs of machines, top of machines, sides of machines and even the tops of machines if I remember the cube right. Heck, ever look at one of those desktop units, buttons for floppies, CD’s to open the front, now where is that power button?).
Yup tell a guy to power cycle the machine, that is the legacy of MS, make something simple complicated. Don’t use language the user will understand like “turn off the machine”. Instead be sophisticated, make him think you are a god with statements like “power cycle the machine” or “reengage the electron flow by disconnecting the circuit temporarily, then reset the controls for a reboot.”
You could write a whole doctoral thesis on the patronizing degrading system messages given by MS, some of which you have to read 4-5 times to make any sense of it.
I wonder how much time anyone took to show this guy where the one off switch was.
2. I can see a few possibilities of why someone would take it upon himself to upgrade the RAM by himself.
-the person was probably tired of asking IT for help. Or impatient.
-the person was given no indication that you are not supposed to service machine (if this was a corporate machine, if it was a personal machine, well that’s a different story).
-I wonder where the instruction booklet was to help him, at his desk where he could have used it, or locked away in the IT cupboard, where you would have to sign it out, only if you were worthy of course.
Maybe this person loves to tinker. I wonder what support they got?
3. What a person asking for training but not sure of what kind of training they need. Awwwww what a stumper that must be for you. I guess you are one of those magnificent people that has decided what to discover before you discover it. Yup, I can imagine all those great minds of the planet, like Galileo waking up one day and saying “hmm today I am going to discover that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around.
Yup, I have heard these stories before, and watched some so called “IT training”. I remember one session that was particularly fruitful to me because I once shared a training session with one. She went up to the front, put on one of those power point sessions, told everybody to follow her step by step. She even used a powerful analogy of staying on the tour boat…too bad some never even got on, and where lost for the longest time.
That afternoon it was my turn. I gave them about 10 minutes of what the final product should look like and let them go at it. The thing was, that during the morning session, I watched the users/my clients. They all had different approaches and by watching them, I knew a lot about them. There were the quiet ones that would go about the work, asking for help. There were others that liked to talk and socialize while doing it. I clustered them and even suggested that they did not have to do an individual project, that they could do one together. The solitary braniacs that got the project done early were sent to help other co-workers, adding to the team spirit.
And for a long time afterwards, it was easy to support them. Why? Cause I knew the user, and I knew how to support the user. Some only need a manual, some need a social event, some need hand holding, it doesn’t matter, they are all valid ways of proceeding, diverse maybe but valid and that makes them right.
Maybe you should take your head out of the server’s asshole and take a look at your clients and try to gain some respect towards them instead of pouring out the total contempt you have demonstrated here.
It’s still missing encrypted data store and true push email. Yes I a) know what I am talking about and b) work in IT management for a Fortune 200.
Without those = FAIL, at least in large corporate environments.
Thank you for sharing information about your participation in the iPhone 2.0 beta. Most of the beta program’s I’ve been part of have required a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Did Apple require an NDA for the iPhone 2.0 beta?
When will apple fan boys pull their butts out of their collective asses. Without IT folks everyone else at the company might as well go home. Without IT you have no access so get used to it. Leave your unsecured little toy home and grow up. If its not allowed then you won’t be using it. Jobs isn’t god so stop praying to his golden cow already.
Michael: If its not allowed then you won’t be using it.
Yeah, that’s what the disablers of technology always say. And every single battle that IT has fought with the user, they have lost.
Get used to technology outstripping your usefulness, especially if you know nothing but Windows.