I’ve been following the press regarding the iPhone, as are many others. I’ll go on record as saying that damn thing is cool. If it supported Exchange I probably would have been one of those enthusiasts (or idiots depending on your POV) standing in line all night to get one. The reality is that they do not support Exchange. And when I say support Exchange I don’t mean can it POP / IMAP off Exchange. I mean native Exchange support for calendaring, public folders, OMA, etc. My corporate life revolves around Exchange and mobility is a big part of that.
I saw thispost from Mary Jo Foley at Zdnet this morning. The June 28th Rollup fixes for Exchange 2007 have a fix for an issue with IMAP version 4 compatibility. Word on the street is that this will fix issues with iPhone and Exchange from an IMAP standpoint. In that same post is a quote from an analyst at the Burton Group that is worth mentioning.
““If Apple wants to make it easy for enterprise customers to buy iPhones, they’re going to need to license ActiveSync,†said Peter O’Kelly, an analyst with the Burton Group.”
This is important for road warriors that use Outlook / Exchange who may not have access to Outlook Mobile Access. It would be the only way to keep Outlook and iPhone in sync. I do not know if there is any API or other stub that could be licensed to a 3rd party to do the sync. Either way as the article points out the Windows Mobile team, and more importantly their phone manufacturer partners, would probably not be happy if iPhone licensed ActiveSync.
–Chris
Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, ActiveSync, Exchange, Outlook
June 30th, 2007 at 11:36 am
The question, that will be answered in the following weeks is; does Apple really need to cater to enterprise customers to keep the sales up?
On a different note, it’s always possible sync your Outlook Calendar with your Google Calendar which can surely sync with the iPhone. (downside: RemoteCalendars probably have to run continually on a computer on the company network)
Where there is a will, there is a way and with millions of enterprise users hungry for iPhones, somebody will solve any calendar sync problems that might present themselves.