iPhone Enterprise Wants/Needs

[The Hoff]

Well...

I've had my personal phone for a little while now, and yesterday my second iPhone arrived (work phone) along with the 7 others I ordered for ze team.

I've noticed serveral things so far missing and some of which are bloody annoying in an enterprise environment:

-Mail, missing so many functions it's untrue. Lack of usability on things like 'back to top', lack of shift selecting several items. Lack of searching ability at all. Also won't display notifications on mail where rules are applied to move things to sub-folders.

I'm really hoping that PocketInformant for iPhone pulls through as at present it looks h'amazing!

-Lack of phone profiles, no way of setting a 'meeting' profile along with the rest of the feature set.

-Buggy 2.0 firmware, a lot more problematic on this firmware than on 1.1.4. For instance a colleague has had problems with push email from his mailbox and it's needed hard resetting a few times.

-Annoying sandbox, obviously running things in the background would be great. Hoping 2.1 clears this up along with the above, but the slated GPS improvements (who cares?) and rumoured cut/paste are so far all I've seen on it.

-iPhone config utility is fking useless, period. Makes it completely impossible to hand this out to 'staff' for fear they'll install a million and one apps, and indulge in hacking the damned thing.

Apart from that it's good, just missing some critical enterprise function, and obviously appreciate it's early days...doesn't make my job easy though in switching from Bberrys

 

[sn00p]

Re: iPhone Wants/Needs

Well...
-Lack of phone profiles, no way of setting a 'meeting' profile along with the rest of the feature set.

Yeah, would be nice to be able to set up different silent profiles, i.e Silent with vibrate, silent without vibrate etc. Great feature would be to automatically switch to silent during a time period, so crap email doesn't wake me up during the night.

-Annoying sandbox, obviously running things in the background would be great. Hoping 2.1 clears this up along with the above, but the slated GPS improvements (who cares?) and rumoured cut/paste are so far all I've seen on it.

Not going to happen. They've already stated that apps running in the background account for a massive power/processing drain and that their push system solves this issue...of course, apps have to be specially written to cope with this as it's nothing more than pushing a badge to an app to indicate something has happened.

Cut & paste on a device like this is a neccesary really!

-iPhone config utility is fking useless, period. Makes it completely impossible to hand this out to 'staff' for fear they'll install a million and one apps, and indulge in hacking the damned thing.

Apart from that it's good, just missing some critical enterprise function, and obviously appreciate it's early days...doesn't make my job easy though in switching from Bberrys

Yeah it's not just missing enterprise features, it's missing some basic usability features...pretty sure they'll come in time. The SMS preview should be an option regardless of keylock, I find that one quite annoying actually. I'm quite happy for it to tell me I have an sms, I don't need it to paste it up on screen for all to see!

 

[The Hoff]

Indeed, background utilities isn't a huge problem and the Jabber push will help with such things - It's a nice to have. The missing mail functionality is essential though, as is a much more comprehensive policy system.

Yesterday I was reading about this policy deployment and enforcement, you can put a policy on an iPhone but the user has the option with their password to remove the policy...way to go!

 

[Daz]

There is "go to top" in mail, and there is select multiple messages and move/delete.

 

[sn00p]

Indeed, background utilities isn't a huge problem and the Jabber push will help with such things - It's a nice to have. The missing mail functionality is essential though, as is a much more comprehensive policy system.

Yesterday I was reading about this policy deployment and enforcement, you can put a policy on an iPhone but the user has the option with their password to remove the policy...way to go!

Hopefully once they get substantial enterprise deployment the things that enterprises need will be added, I'm sure they'd like nothing more than to flush RIM down the toilet.

I've played with the iPhone configuration app briefly, just to see what you could do. I'm guessing that anybody can mess with the policies when the phone is connected to the app which is an issue in the enterprise situation?

It's by far the best phone I've ever own, despite the features that are missing.

Non background apps will be interesting when it comes to proper "sat nav" - especially when a call comes in just as you get to complex set of junctions!

V3 firmware I suspect will be "awesome".

 

[The Hoff]

There is "go to top" in mail, and there is select multiple messages and move/delete.

The 'hidden' goto top function for users it's simply unclear, needs to be better anotated IMO. I spent yesterday telling 7 people how to do that exact thing instead of scrolling through thousands of items. A system as per the contacts page with a 'bar' would be better served.

The multiple move/delete via edit also doesn't cut the mustard. It's fine for a few emails, but when you're attempting to manage an inbox with as above a thousand items it's useless. The other point being a mentioned a shift+select, which there is not. On BB, you can easily search your inbox for all from contact "Administrator" then delete the lot easily, on this I cannot.

 

[Daz]

Ah, right, got ya.
The thing is, the iPhone is primarily aimed at people who use their phones as an extension to their laptop/PC. I only ever read new e-mails generally on it, and then use my laptop or PC to do the real stuff.

Guess that's where Apple need to sort out their enterprise stuff, but, they'll always be aiming at the individual rather than corporate - the "iPhone Enterprise" stuff is just a nice extra.

 

[The Hoff]

I hope they sort it full stop, a half baked solution isn't something Apple like to put their name to frequently. But agreed the BB is simply an email client, where as the iPhone is (a buggy crashfest on version 2.0) a lot more, but consequently as present isn't Enterprise class.

Check out PocketInformant, it looks massively better!!!
http://www.pocketinformant.com/products_info.php?p_id=pocketinformant_iphone