With hundreds of thousands of iPhones flying off the shelves in the U.S. in the last three weeks -- and numerous Apple stores reporting renewed shortages of the popular device -- chances are good that IT staffers will be asked sooner or later to get an iPhone working on the corporate network.
Given that Apple has a reputation for making consumer-focused products that -- at least in the past -- didn't always play nice at work, most IT managers are likely skeptical of letting iPhones on their networks. Even without enterprise purchasing plans, a real keyboard and slow EDGE network speeds, the sheer form and function of this revolutionary piece of technology may soon have your management team pushing you to evaluate it for mass deployment.
Whether that new iPhone is company property or was bought by rogue employees, don't panic. By following a few easy steps, IT staffers might find that iPhone can make their lives easier -- and your colleagues (or boss) ecstatic:
-- Lock down the iPhone. If your employees are going to be accessing corporate assets, you will want to activate the four-digit lock/unlock code. That way, if the phone is lost or stolen, someone else won't be reading your corporate e-mail. The passcode is off by default, but it's easy to turn on. Go to Settings->General->Passcode Lock and have the user enter something easy to remember. It isn't Fort Knox, but it's as good as a garden-variety BlackBerry/Windows Mobile device and will keep out most intruders. Also, make sure the sleep time is set to something low like the one-minute default. Not only will this keep the iPhone safer, it will save some battery time.
-- Get a protective case. Spend the $20 needed to get a slick but supportive case that will actually be used. Remind your iPhone-totin' workers that they are basically carrying around a fragile, $600 piece of technology that is one drop or slip away from being worthless. More importantly for you, by retrofitting the iPhone with some physical protection, you can avoid having to do all the paperwork, restoration and configuring of a replacement iPhone should breakage happen.
-- Set up that phone/visual voice mail. Oh yeah! This is a phone after all. Take a few minutes to set it up and explain the visual voice-mail feature and save yourself support calls in the future. The nonlinear voice-mail layout remains one of the most unsung features of the iPhone and one of the supposed justifications for keeping it locked to AT&T. The true advantage arises when a significant number of calls have gone unanswered -- with some calls almost invariably more important than others. With visual voice mail, calls are laid out in e-mail-like fashion, allowing the user to listen and respond to the more important messages first -- just like you'd do in e-mail. This feature offers a strong business case for using the iPhone over BlackBerry/Windows Mobile, so you'll want to make sure users actually take advantage of it.
-- Use software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications like Basecamp or Salesforce.com. These types of apps really shine on the iPhone and are growing in popularity, exist only in "the cloud" (on the Net) and take advantage of the AJAX-capable browser features that iPhone rivals lack. Perhaps this is why Steve Jobs is so adamant about trying to spur development of Web 2.0 iPhone applications. Help out your users and pop any needed SaaS-worthy URLs into the Safari browser bookmarks -- assuming they haven't already been transferred with the bookmark sync in iTunes.
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