After listening to its many enterprise customers. Apple has come to a licensing agreement with Microsoft and is building Exchange ActiveSync right into the iPhone. Before there were usually a server or two between a mobile device user and the Exchange server. Now, right out-of-the-box an iPhone can connect to
Microsoft Exchange Servers 2003 and 2007 for secure over-the-air push
email, contacts, calendars and global address lists. Apple demonstrated this in its March 6th keynote. This built in support also enables such security features as remote wipe,
password policies and auto-discovery. This would allow for an administrator to render any lost or stolen iPhone free of sensitive corporate information.
The new iPhone 2.0 software supports
Cisco IPsec VPN. This will help ensure the highest level of IP-based encryption
available for transmission of sensitive corporate data, as well as the
ability to authenticate using digital certificates or password-based, authentication. IT administrators will have a new configuration utility that allows them to easily and quickly set up many iPhones, including
password policies, VPN settings, installing certificates, and email server
settings. Once the configuration is defined it can then be easily
and securely delivered to the iPhone user. Once installed, the user
will have access to all their corporate IT services.
The push feature of the Exchange server is the truly powerful part. Any user on the system can update a contact or a calender and the update will immediately be pushed to all users without having to log into the system. Now you will have no excuses for missing a meeting time that was changed.