No more hiding in the server room

iPhones in the enterprise*

We're going through a mobile phone upgrade at work and are moving from the carrier's e-mail push to phone system to using OMA throughout the company. This is a good thing as far as we're concerned however the fly in the ointment is we're now getting iPhones available.

Does anyone else utilise iPhones in their workplace? If so, got any advice / tips / pitfalls to watch out for?

Many thanks

* Not the USS Enterprise!

Tags: iphone, oma

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Permalink Reply by Jason Short on April 30, 2010 at 8:17pm

We have a relatively small deployment of iPhones - probably < 30. They really seem to just work - point it at the OWA server and put in your password.

Probably the biggest problem we have is people changing their Windows passwords but not changing it on the phone, which locks them out in short order. Which happens with any kind of phone that authenticates against Active Directory.

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Permalink Reply by Wesley "Nonapeptide" on May 1, 2010 at 12:17am

I don't use iPhones in the enterprise, but can only find one good reason not to: compliance. I know of engineering firms that require all of their engineers to get phones without cameras, or if they do have cameras they must somehow have them deactivated. If field engineers were hired out to a super secret customer (which happens often) they don't want the possibility of industrial espionage. As far as I know, you can't have such granular control over iPhones concerning what features or applications they are allowed to run.

However, in places where compliance at such a granular level is not an issue, I'd blanket the whole office in iPhones so I'd never have to field another question about triplicate entries in a WinMo user's calendar or just about any operating question about BlackBerries again.

I'm curious to see where Android goes. The Enterprise is BlackBerry's game to lose.

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Permalink Reply by Travis on May 6, 2010 at 12:24pm

We mainly have BB users but we have one overlord who has, you guessed it an iPhone. I published Activesync through ISA2006 and we have Ent Cert Server internally and all is well calendar the lot as far as I'm aware syncs fine. Just installed the cert on the phone and all synced. You will need to publish Active sync as well as enabling OMA. We now have OCS and he now wants, native IM client (hmm! i see can worms getting opened).

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Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on May 6, 2010 at 2:26pm

We were 100% blackberries until one fateful Thanksgiving, mine died while I was remote. We had AT&T, and the store was out of blackberries, but had iPhones, and I needed _something_, so guess what I got?

Now, a year and a half later, we're 75% iPhones, with only a couple of holdouts.

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Permalink Reply by Graycat on May 7, 2010 at 4:14pm

Well it's been an interesting deployment so far, I can tell you!

Most of the headaches have all been at the server end and there have been some great ones. It got so bad that I might have accidentally killed all of the OMA + ActiveSync services on one particular server just after I blanked my old phone. Fortunately I was able to move my mailbox over to the designated primary test server and get all my contacts etc synchronising again. The downed server is still working as Exchange + OWA so it'll just have to wait. :o) lol

So far my verdict of the iPhone is very positive and I think it'll work well in the enterprise. However a few things need to be bottomed out and written policies laid down on what is / isn't allowed with them.

Oh and "mobile device manager" with remote wipe is going to be a HUGE temptation down the line 3:o)