Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Corporate iPhone: WLAN connection and Outlook web

The iPhone is a lousy business phone. Of course the BlackBerry ain’t so great either – the key difference is that the BB usually comes with a pass to the corporate exchange server. That’s a big deal though.

On the other hand, I’ve made some progress.

Briefly:

  1. The iPhone’s support for WPA Enterprise let me connect quickly to our corporate LAN. It was a lot easier than connecting my XP laptop, but I’m not sure I have all privileges the laptop has – even though I’m authenticating the same way.
  2. With the iPhone I can use the web interface to Exchange server. It’s hardlyl mobile friendly, but it runs on Safari/iPhone.

Connecting directly to Exchange server is another matter.

Even if it were officially supported, an Exchange connection would wipe my personal iPhone calendaring and contact information. The only way I know of to have both corporate and personal data on an iPhone is to sync corporate data with Exchange and Personal data with MobileMe. The latter, of course, is remarkably inadequate.

For now the Exchange connection isn’t available, but if it were it would be exquisitely painful to give up the power of Google Calendar in favor of MobileMe Calendar. I really do need a miraculous improvement in MobileMe …

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