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Using Apple’s Devices in an Enterprise Environment

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appleI saw yesterday that Rodney over at the theLazyadmin.com posted a great article on . I never knew this stuff even existed, so thanks for posting this Rodney.

The iPhone and iPad have become business devices even if they are intended for consumers. The economic development staff where I work run with iPhones and iPads, the Manager of Library Services has an iPhone and I have an iPad. Other’s personally have apple devices which they would like to use to collect their corporate mail, etc. We also deploy iTunes to all the library computers (it is actually part of the master image) to support a program called OverDrive. OverDrive allows our patrons to borrow audiobooks from the library.  One thing I always felt was that Apple wasn’t doing a great job of enterprise support, little did I know there was a whole area devoted to it on their website. Now I feel a bit foolish.

If you are looking to setup your Apple devices within a corporate environment, here are the links to the Enterprise Support. For iPad it is located at http://www.apple.com/support/ipad/enterprise/. For the iPhone, it is located at http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/enterprise/.

The Strength of the Blackberry

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Mark Evans posted a bit about what he thought was the strength of the blackberry, which is its keyboard. While I agree with Mark that the keyboard is easy and makes popping of an email quick, I have seen my friends with iPhones do it just as quick as me. I also had to buy pointing sticks for some of the staff as they just couldn’t use the keyboard on their Blackberry, it was too difficult for them.  I personally feel the strength of the Blackberry is its corporate inroads and how easy it is to get up and running. Getting a Blackberry running in a corporate environment is as simple as downloading the Enterprise Server from Blackberry, installing it on a computer and then linking it to your messaging infrastructure. There is no inbound firewall ports to open which helps mitigate the risk to the environment and there was no security certificates needed to be purchased . While these things aren’t harder to do work wise, in some environments it creates more complexity as there might be different teams for the firewall versus the messaging teams.

As long as RIM has its NOC and no one else is going that route, I don’t see RIM’s dominance in the corporate environment fading. The only other company who could pull off putting up a NOC tomorrow would be Microsoft and I could see them doing it as a SaaS offering which would tie into Exchange.