About 6 weeks ago I posted about some announcements from Apple regarding integration of the iPhone platform with more corporate email systems, most notably Lotus Notes. A couple more sources are starting to pick up on this theme, including some other bloggers and a financial analyst who seems to be predicting Exchange server integration as well in the coming weeks. Although the details on the Notes integration are pretty well known from the story a couple weeks ago, the Microsoft integration plans are pretty much unknown:
The analyst cites his own industry and developer sources, who suggest that after "months of beta testing" this weakness will be addressed with improvements in iPhone's ability to work with Exchange server and IBM's Lotus Notes.
"What isn't as clear to us is how Apple will accomplish this, whether this is from internal development (most likely), third-parties including MSFT (next likely) with its ActiveSync technology, or RIM Blackberry Connect (possible but less likely), or a combination of two or more."
I can't decide if this guy has inside information that he's being coy with, or if it is just wishful thinking. What I really can figure is how Apple would be able to do it with their own custom programming and not infringe on the various Microsoft patents while still providing real-time integration and performance. At that point it would make sense to just license the ActiveSync technology and save a lot of time and effort on the development side of things. Of course, that would also mean admitting that they need the technology from Microsoft, so that's probably not going to happen anytime soon from Apple.
The iPhone is a great device from a usability perspective, and I'd love to see it integrate with the Exchange platform as well as it does with the others out there, but I'm not sure that is really going to come to fruition. The folks at Apple also need to consider that many corporations have requirements of manageability of the devices above and beyond basic integration with the messaging platform. To truly get a foot in the door on the corporate side of things there are a number of additional things that would need to be considered, like lockout/password policies and remote wipe of the device, something that the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices have today and have had for some time.
It'd be nice, but I'm still not seeing the iPhone as a corporate tool in the immediate future.
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