iPhone Enterprise Beta Program

So the enterprise news is that Apple has licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft. This lets the iPhone do a slew of things deemed essential for the enterprise market — push email/contacts/calendars, device configuration, remote wipe, and more. This opens an entirely new market to the iPhone, the one currently dominated by RIM’s BlackBerry. Apple’s pitch on this is that with ActiveSync, the iPhone talks directly to Exchange, whereas with BlackBerrys, they go through proprietary intermediary servers of RIM’s.

This doesn’t make the iPhone a BlackBerry killer, but the iPhone can do more BlackBerry-ish things than the BlackBerry can do iPhone-ish things.

★ Thursday, 6 March 2008