Borrowing from Secret’s deodorant slogan, “iPhone is good enough for business users, but designed for consumers.” It’s clear that Apple designed the iPhone for consumers, but that doesn’t stop business people from lusting over the ability to use it for business functions. Email tops the list. Support for Microsoft Exchange is available for iPhone owners, but not from Apple.
IT managers cringe at the idea of granting iPhone owner access to SMTP or IMAP because it would require opening up a hole in the company’s firewall. This is a very big no-no.
Synchronica offers what they call Mobile Gateway, a solution for synchronizing calendar, address book, tasks, notes and email between iPhone and Microsoft Exchange. It uses Microsoft’s secure Outlook Web Access (OWA) to retrieve email from a corporate Exchange server, a service enabled by many enterprises to provide users with access to corporate email from home or while traveling.
Synchronica’s Mobile Gateway 3.0 provides a unique “zero footprint” architecture where users simply register their devices with Mobile Gateway and instantly start to receive push email on the iPhone.
Visto, Apple (we believe), Intermedia and others are developing similar solutions for iPhone. Visto’s approach is different in that it requires installing an application on your corporate network. Users can then securely access both Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino corporate messaging platforms.
There were a lot of unconfirmed rumors flying around last month that Apple will soon offer its own support for the Exchange ActiveSync Protocol. Under the license agreement, iPhone owners would be able to configure and use Microsoft’s push email and remote synchronization.
Intermedia is expected to offer an “iPhone plan” which includes one mailbox for just $10.95 per month, plus ActiveSync access for $4.95 per month; a grand total of $15.90. Users will get 500 MB of disk space per mailbox and access to the extensive features of Exchange 2007, such as calendars, contacts and OWA 2007 Web mail, in addition to direct push email.
Synchronica Syncs Apple iPhone to Microsoft Exchange [PhoneMag.com]
Dumb story. iPhone already supports IMAP and POP3 with SSL encryption, and it also supports connecting through a VPN. There is no security concern.
That is NOT what this is about. This is about corporate email pushing from existing corporate email systems such as exchange and notes. No corporate firewall is going to allow IMAP through their firewalls. It is a unsecure method of communication. That being said, these companies are producing a method for corporate America to use the iPhone with their existing email systems. Which is EXACTLY what I am looking for. I just wish Apple would license ActiveSync and get this over with.
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