The iPhone: Just say no

At long last, the Apple iPhone has shipped, and more than a half-million of the hybrid phone/entertainment devices are in the wild after a sell-out first weekend of sales. More are on the way, as the invasion has begun. The question is, how long until the iPhone invades your network?

There’s no doubt, Apple has created a very interesting consumer device. It rings, it sings, it’s full of technology bling. Nevertheless, it’s still a consumer device, and it has no place in the corporate world today.

Even Apple has said that it’s definitely not targeting business users with this product. At least not this version of the product. Network World reported in April that AT&T, the exclusive telephony provider for the iPhone, has expressed a different point of view. An anonymous source at Cingular (now AT&T) reported that the company was working on its billing and support systems to prepare for enterprise business for the iPhone.

Despite AT&T’s alleged enterprise ambitions, CIOs and IT analysts alike are playing a different tune when it comes to the iPhone, and well they should. IPhone 1.0 was not engineered with enterprise needs in mind. Still, that won’t stop enthusiastic end users from asking if they can have their corporate e-mail diverted to their new consumer device. You can tell them “no,” but they’ll keep hounding you to make it happen.

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At long last, the Apple iPhone has shipped, and more than a half-million of the hybrid phone/entertainment devices are in the wild after a sell-out first weekend of sales. More are on the way, as the invasion has begun. The question is, how long until the iPhone invades your network?

There’s no doubt, Apple has created a very interesting consumer device. It rings, it sings, it’s full of technology bling. Nevertheless, it’s still a consumer device, and it has no place in the corporate world today.

Even Apple has said that it’s definitely not targeting business users with this product. At least not this version of the product. Network World reported in April that AT&T, the exclusive telephony provider for the iPhone, has expressed a different point of view. An anonymous source at Cingular (now AT&T) reported that the company was working on its billing and support systems to prepare for enterprise business for the iPhone.

Despite AT&T’s alleged enterprise ambitions, CIOs and IT analysts alike are playing a different tune when it comes to the iPhone, and well they should. IPhone 1.0 was not engineered with enterprise needs in mind. Still, that won’t stop enthusiastic end users from asking if they can have their corporate e-mail diverted to their new consumer device. You can tell them “no,” but they’ll keep hounding you to make it happen.

The iPhone isn’t the only consumer technology that’s causing IT departments heartburn right now. Consumer e-mail services are another source of pain.

I was horrified to read a column by Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago. Gomes wrote about Web-based e-mail services, specifically those from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. The gist of the article was that these services offer unlimited file storage, and the implication was that business users should forward their business mail to their consumer e-mail accounts to get around storage limitations imposed by ornery e-mail administrators at their companies.

In Gomes’ words, “…the free e-mail services available from the big Web companies are often faster and have more storage than the corporate accounts that office stiffs use in their jobs every day. It’s thus now common for people to forward work e-mail to an outside free account, turning it into a permanent archive that’s always available for quick searching.”

I can almost hear every corporate compliance officer, lawyer and IT security manager gasp for air after reading that little gem of an idea.

As if the job of securing endpoints and corporate data, and preserving corporate records like e-mail isn’t tough enough, now you have an apparent authority figure from the Wall Street Journal suggesting that all corporate e-mail should be forwarded to Yahoo for permanent “archiving.” I mean, why not trust your corporate communications to the same services that Aunt Millie uses to send jokes to her bunko group?

I remember reading an article some time ago about a Fortune 50 CEO (Jack Welch, maybe?) who would give consumer devices like PDAs and iPods to his executive staff members and tell them to use them and figure out if they could be used to enhance current or create new business opportunities for the company. The CEO said this would help spark innovation and get the company out of a rut. I can only imagine the reaction of the CIO, who might be forced to figure out how to make a consumer device fit into the enterprise. While the other senior VPs are having fun with their iPods, the CIO will be worrying about security, manageability, the cost of support and those other silly things that IT “office stiffs” think about.