IT wishes for Apple's iPhone event

With Apple's planned iPhone SDK and enterprise announcements less than 24 hours away, it's time to focus on potential IT developments coming out of Thursday's press briefing. While there's been plenty of focus on the promised Software Development Kit likely to get unveiled, few have really focused on the second-half of Apple's planned agenda, the part that promises to delve into "some exciting new enterprise features."

Take Macworld's wish-list for iPhone apps--it's a fine list, but it lacks a certain... je ne sais quoi that IT administrators find irresistible. So I thought I'd add my own two cents worth on what I, as an IT administrator would like to see coming out of Cupertino Thursday and who I think will provide it. No, I don't think I'll get all of them. But I'll take batting .500 with a smile.

Full APIs for Mail, Calendaring, and Notes on the iPhone

While everyone has been up in arms about Exchange clients, et al., I don't necessarily think separate clients are the answer. Instead, what I'd like to see are APIs for the components that make up what we think of as "groupware". So rather than creating a separate groupware client, a developer can take the existing functionality, and extend it so that, for example, Mail can have a new account type for Exchange, Notes, Groupwise, whatever. I'd like to see the same for Calendar and Notes. I deal with various groupware implementations that have their own applications, and honestly, it's a pain, because then I have to bounce back and forth between the groupware client and my other email accounts. Having the access to extend the use of the existing application set would end up being a more useful solution.

Who will provide this: Apple

Remote Calendar/Note access

I want to see the iPhone have the ability to access remote calendar servers, such as, oh, iCal server, and maybe even sync up notes with some other remote server that supports such things. This may seem to be a duplicate of No. 1, but it's not. Full API access for the iPhone calendar will be a little useless if you can't easily couple it to an external server. If the only support Apple provides is for CalDAV servers, that's fine. CalDAV is an open standard, it should be relatively easy to write server-level plugins that translate between CalDAV and Exchange/Notes/Groupwise/etc. This option would allow you to add iPhones into your existing infrastructure without having to write any client code at all. APIs for this feature would be even better, allowing on-device connectors for non-Apple groupware servers.

Who will provide this: Apple

Better device-level security

Right now, the only thing between a stranger and your iPhone is the rather limited security provided by an all-numerical PIN. Big Enterprise needs aside, that's not great. Even in the SMB market, there's a growing awareness of the need for things like full-disk encryption and two-factor authentication. I would love to see Apple take the lead here, and provide not only support for full-device data encryption, but also support for two-factor authentication. I don't expect Apple to do 100 percent of this work, but writing the code for the device encryption and providing APIs for external authentication would be a good thing. Obviously, along with this, I'd like to see support for Kerberos, since it's a critical part of Apple's desktop security implementation.

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