Apple's iPhone in the enterprise

It certainly came as a bit of a surprise when Apple announced that it had licensed Activesync from Microsoft and was bringing full Exchange Server support to the iPhone. After all, Apple had marketed the device almost exclusively to consumers since its release and had ignored repeated requests from users for corporate email support. So why now? And does the iPhone really stand a chance against entrenched enterprise players like Microsoft, RIM and Palm?

Whether or not [the iPhone] will be picked up as a strong enterprise class device remains to be seen. Whether it will become a force in enterprise messaging like Windows Mobile also remains to be seen. Windows Mobile still has the fullest implementation of Activesnyc on the market but that isn’t going to keep us from licensing that technology to other device manufacturers. I think that this really says a lot about Microsoft’s commitment to standards. We obviously feel that Windows Mobile is a premium enterprise experience but if people want to experience Exchange on another device then we want to give them that choice. When you’re a company as big as Microsoft, you’re invariably going to have people who are your partner in some areas and a competitor in others. I think that’s a healthy environment—that’s just good capitalism.

One of the things that’s very important about Activesync, from an admin perspective, is the ability for the admin to make the final decision. We’ve built in controls for admins in Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1 to give people really granular control—admins can make the choice for which devices they’re going to allow and what policies they want to be respected. An IT department can decide that if a device doesn’t support certain policies, it won’t be allowed to sync. On the software side, we make sure that admins have full control of their network and what devices attach to it.