[macless]

Obviously most of you,don't have your own company,because the IPhone is so much fun and user friendly people will spend to much time playing with them to be productive.Please counter.

[cwhisonant]

Just a note - when IBM releases Lotus Traveler for iPhone later this year, there will be some centralized management that should help with this in many aspects.

[bcode]

The same could be said for Blackberries (with games, txting, and internet access), regular cell phones (with games, music and txting) or even computers connected to the internet...

Anything that brings a productivity increase due to updated technical ability, also brings with it the ability to do less work if one chooses.

The key to being a good boss is to delegate tasks properly... When asking an employee to complete a task, don't give specific instructions, instead instruct the end results you're looking for and allow that employee to devise a way to get there. Employees who are trusted more, and allowed to make daily decisions will work harder and smarter for you... Limiting their fun time and what sort of tools they can use to do their job will, on the other hand, get you a sack full of moldy workers with limited ambition and even less respect for you, the boss.

[flowney]

I wonder if the new "Mobile Access" in MacOS X 10.6 Server (see: http://www.apple.com...le-access.html) could become the basis of an answer to this objection.

[danmusician]

macless said:

Obviously most of you,don't have your own company,because the IPhone is so much fun and user friendly people will spend to much time playing with them to be productive.Please counter.

In today's job market, it shouldn't be too hard to find a replacement for employees who prefer to play rather than work. I have a friend whose receptionist couldn't understand that she wasn't allow to use her own cell phone while on the job. He gave her a warning that if she did it again she would be fired. She said she understood. The next day, she was on her cell again. The day after that, he had a new receptionist. Problem solved.

[AppleHead]

They guy said less than 2% use tethering and, “I’m assuming Apple has found a way to make tethering extra simple to set up, and it could be a nice thing, but the majority of users just don’t do it.”
I bet once it's easy a lot more than 2% will do it.
I had many features on my old pre-iPhone cell phone that I never used because they were just such a hassle.

[Nahel]

Agree with most of you. Some IT departments are scared of the iPhone as the need for their service will decrease tremendously and their control will diminish.
I am afraid that IT will do to the iPhone in Business what they did to the Mac OS as they resisted it so much knowing that their job is secure as long their customers continue to use Windows.

[gudin]

AppleHead said:

They guy said less than 2% use tethering and, “I’m assuming Apple has found a way to make tethering extra simple to set up, and it could be a nice thing, but the majority of users just don’t do it.”

I bet once it's easy a lot more than 2% will do it.

I had many features on my old pre-iPhone cell phone that I never used because they were just such a hassle.

Non-Apple people never get that about Apple products. You can have the tech specs, but if it's a pain to use, who cares? When Apple releases new devices which make those existing things usable by non-geeks, suddenly they seem revolutionary. The iPod was a great example too. Slashdot was all about what a laughably useless thing the iPod was when released. Over-priced, didn't do anything anything else already did, etc. Now, guaranteed 95% of those original posters have iPods.

The iPhone is the same. There was Internet, email, contacts, etc. on phones before the iPhone. When the iPhone was announced, all the carriers and pundits scoffed at how irrelevant it was going to be, and then as it developed it's vibe, all the other manufacturers started making devices which looked vaguely like an iPhone, and marketed them as iPhone killers.

Then the iPhone actually came out. The iPhone was the first device to make all this stuff blindingly obvious to regular people. Did crazily well immediately, and has only ramped up since. Is it because of the specs? No. It's the DESIGN, and the SOFTWARE that matters.

[dreyfus]

Anybody commenting on the "enterprise suitability" of a device two days before the software is released and four days before the device is released... should be called any four-letter word of your choice, but not IT professional or analyst for sure.

I have just reviewed the iPhone OS 3.0 introduction video once again to analyze some of the 100 features / 1000 APIs slides... and, sure enough, according to the slides iPhone OS 3.0 does support EAS policies (at least one slide clearly said so). This would make the device at least as controllable as any WinMob phone. If you route all corporate emails over a corporate server, you can document them on the server, and not on the mobile device, which is the wrong approach anyhow. There is no policy for any industry that forces you to store and archive messages that have never been sent, and whatever has been sent or received goes through the server, case closed. Even some fortune 100 companies allow employees to buy and use their own phones, some of them having no encryption at all, no activated SIM and/or PIN locks and in some cases not even support for IMAP ? so, indeed they "physically" remove mails from the servers... Even in critical industries, only a limited amount of users does have access to critical data (if this is not the case, then the phone is certainly not their main problem). The vast majority of industry espionage is still performed through social engineering (some say more than 90%), no device helps here. If the CIA, the KGB, the Mossad or the Salvation Army wants your phone, they will get it and they will decrypt it. Always. Educating users that some content does not belong into emails ever would be the better approach...

There is one sole thing about the iPhone that I would consider a valid security issue if a company has such a policy... and that's the lack of support for PGP or S/MIME... funny that none of these "pros" even mentions it... but then, they are only concerned about doing each and everything the Windows way. Because that is proven to be safe. Yeah.

[AppleHead]

*dreyfus: Hope you forward a copy of your excellent response to the comments blog at Computerworld, with maybe a cc to the author.

[NaOH]

The one thing that puzzles me, is the way the analysts who are quoted in the article appear to assume that Apple WANTS to be in the Enterprise marketplace.

I don't recall Apple ever saying anything about this.

My experience is that Apple respond to consumer demand, rather than chasing a certain market segment.

[cwhisonant]

By enabling Exchange sync with 2.0, they did get into the Enterprise marketplace.

[Steve_S]

Despite what these "analysts" have written, there is no longer any real barrier regarding the iPhone and the corporate market. Yes, Apple could possibly do more to make some things easier for IT shops to manager the device, but that's not a real barrier. The latest addition of encryption and remote wipe capabilities were the only legitimate barriers that existed. I have to question the competence of these analysts. Not because they haven't embraced the iPhone, but because they discuss things like audibility of message contents without acknowledging that this is done at the server level for all devices. Companies have record retention policies for such information for the express purpose of audits and various legal compliance issues.

It's unfortunate that some IT managers end up getting a bad name because of a few people that seem to exist in almost every company. Speaking as an IT manager (though not responsible for mobile phone deployment), I see a growing trend of more and more managers within our organization using iPhones. Ultimately, it's the grass root effort of people insisting on using the best device (like an iPhone) as opposed to the company mandated device (like the Blackberry) that will force a change within organizations. The iPhone seems to be on the right trajectory to make that happen within the next couple of years. Remember, for large corporations, change does not come quickly.

[vermonster]

dreyfus said:

Anybody commenting on the "enterprise suitability" of a device two days before the software is released and four days before the device is released... should be called any four-letter word of your choice, but not IT professional or analyst for sure.

Oh, I don't know ... I've read lots of ignorant opinions from industry analysts, and this one right in line with those. All that's required to be an "industry analyst" is to get someone to pay you for your opinions.