iPhone goes corporate and gets Exchange support
From Forbes.com
Steve Jobs just couldn’t resist. The secretive Apple chief executive, who is known to have spent some of his early days hacking the phone system, took a jab at rival smart-phone maker Research In Motion as Apple unveiled new business-friendly features for the iPhone on Thursday. The biggest news: Apple has licensed Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync for the iPhone, allowing iPhone users to pour e-mail and calendar information living on their company’s Microsoft Exchange systems directly into the iPhone.
By contrast, Jobs said, BlackBerry users rely on servers run by Research In Motion (nasdaq: RIMM - news - people ) to shuttle information between corporate servers and BlackBerry users. “Every e-mail goes through a NOC [Network Operations Center] up in Canada,” Jobs said during a question and answer session with reporters. “That provides a single point of failure, but it also provides a very interesting security situation, where someone working up at that NOC could be potentially having a little look at your e-mail. Nobody seems to be focused on that. We certainly are. We think that a direct connection could be a little more secure.”
The jab comes as Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) announced it will build a slew of business-friendly features for the iPhone and iPod Touch, including support for push e-mail, push calendaring, push contacts, virtual private networks and support for certificates and identities into the next version of its iPhone operating system. The neatest trick, however, could be the ability to get e-mail and calendar information directly from Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Exchange servers. And Jobs had no complaints about Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync, which Apple has licensed, to provide these functions for the iPhone.
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