Making the iPhone Better for Business

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The drawbacks: You may still have firewall issues, it can be painfully slow on the EDGE network, and you only have access to your messages while connected to the network. Finally, you could forward all your mail to an Internet service, such a Yahoo! Mail or Google's Gmail. This is very easy, but most corporations flatly prohibit the practice for security reasons.

Most enterprises insist on a secure method for delivering Exchange mail directly to a mobile device that gives corporate information technology managers a way to delete data if the phone is lost or stolen. The three primary methods for doing this are Research in Motion's BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Motorola's Good Mobile Messaging, and Microsoft's Direct Push Technology. Apple has to partner with one or more of them to develop such software for the iPhone. The good news is that while Apple refuses to discuss its plans, there have been persistent rumors of negotiations toward such deals.

Virtual Private Networking

VPN is used to allow secure access to a corporate network through a firewall. The iPhone comes with the same VPN software used on the Mac, but Dulaney describes it as "vulnerable and antiquated." Apple needs to work with companies such as Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks to develop software for enterprise-class VPNs. This would have the side benefit of improving remote access to corporate networks with a Mac computer.

Out-of-Sync Contacts

iPhone is supposed to sync contacts and calendar entries from Microsoft Outlook on your computer. When I tried it, the process seemed to work smoothly, but only about half of my 1,400 contacts made it to the phone. The problem was caused by the iTunes sync software, which choked on the entries in a very obscure data field in Outlook. Apple offered a rather complicated work-around, but it really needs to fix the bug since most businesspeople are lost without their Outlook contacts.

Fix Safari's Missing Features

Apple promised that the Safari browser would bring the "real Internet" to the iPhone instead of the crippled version of Web pages that you can get on most handhelds. It also said that the ability to write browser-based applications was an adequate alternative to the sort of third-party native applications that are available on all other smartphones.

It turns out that both claims are drastically overstated. The iPhone version of Safari is missing two major building blocks of Web-based applications, Sun Microsystems' Java, which is used to run programs in a browser window, and Adobe Systems' Flash, which is used to generate video and multimedia images. Both are extensively used on both consumer and internal corporate Web sites.

Perhaps more seriously, iPhone only half-supports the technologies used to allow users to create content on Web sites, again an approach widely used on both consumer and business sites. The biggest problem is that most of the time, clicking on an area of a page designed from free-form data entry fails to bring up the iPhone's on-screen keyboard, leaving you no way to enter anything. As a result, such Web-based applications as Google and Zoho's productivity applications and Six Apart's TypePad blogging tool don't work on the iPhone.

The problem is solvable, since Transmedia has figured out a way to make its Glide Mobile suite of applications work on the iPhone. But Apple should come up with a general solution rather than forcing each Web service to find a work-around on its own. Apple should also work with Adobe and Sun to add Flash and Java support to the iPhone and to improve Safari's handling of Javascript.

At the moment, corporate IT departments really don't have much to fear from iPhones because they just aren't equipped to work with enterprise systems. But mobile executives buy the overwhelming majority of smartphones, and Apple is going to need these customers. It should move quickly to develop the software partnerships required to meet their needs and win their business.

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Wildstrom is Technology & You columnist for BusinessWeek.