*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Today Apple launched their new iPhone.  Countless users are upgrading everywhere looking forward to playing with the new features of the 3G iPhone.  Before you connect your new iPhone toy to your enterprise exchange server there are a few things you need to be aware of.  For some of you these may be complete show stoppers.

I would have entertained the idea of getting an iPhone until I read this, thus I thought I’d pass it along.

Only Sync With One Computer

When you enable Exchange syncing on your iPhone to get emails from work, the phone will no longer sync contacts and calendars with another desktop computer using iTunes.  Windows Mobile allows users to sync with exchange and with another computer pretty seamlessly.  For example, I am able to sync my calendar and contacts with my work via Exchange but I’m also able to open up my home computer and add a new contacts and have it synced with my phone.  Updating the phone, updates Exchange.  The iPhone only gives you one option.  It makes me wonder what setting up the iPhone does with the new MobileMe service.  I guess we’ll find out.  If you know, comment below.

Lose Existing Contacts / Calendar

If you have an existing iPhone and you upgrade it to the new software be careful. When you setup Exchange support on the phone your old personal contacts and calendar items will be deleted from your iPhone and overwritten with your information.

Unsupported Exchange Features Heavy Email Users Need

For those that have Blackberries and or Windows Mobile apps there are some things the new iPhone will not do (at least at the last time this was tested which may have changed with the release today).

Not supported features of Exchange:

• Folder management
• Syncing tasks
• Setting an “out-of-office” auto reply message
• Create meeting invitations
• Flagging messages for follow-up (of course this is an unsupported feature for any email on the iPhone)
• Setting or seeing ‘high importance” emails (you don’t see the red in the inbox), of course this is an unsupported feature for any email on the iPhone

Are any of these major show stoppers?  For those of us that organize lots of email the folder management is a big one.  Especially if you are monitoring different email folders for system alerts and things.  Syncing tasks is not huge but something I use a lot myself.  The biggest one to me is creating meeting invitations.  To me, this one is a show stopper.

Additional Costs

On top of the existing fees you will have to pay an extra $15 for the “Enterprise Day Plan for iPhone” which puts the monthly cost at $45.00.  It makes sense with the amount of data going back and forth for email but that is still very pricey considering.  Information is here:

http://www.wireless.att.com/businesscenter/iPhone3G/index.jsp 

Disclaimer

Let me say up that I have not tested these myself.  These were some of the things that were discovered during testing a pre-release of the iPhone at work.  Thus, some of these *may* have changed since then.  If you find some discrepancies in anything here, don’t get bent out of shape, just politely leave a comment with a correction.

I just noticed something this morning. I have an infatuation with the word “bytes”.  Yep. I just recognized that.  I had a #TwitterTribe member visiting from Tennessee last night and after we migrated to the computer we started talking about past blogs and other stuff.  We were discussing redirects and combining blogs and that’s when I pulled up my old ZorKa blog (which isn’t available for viewing anymore so no link).  After switching back and forth between my old site and this site I realized something that I hadn’t noticed before.  My old blog title had the word “Bytes” in it and our new podcast has the word “Bytes” in it as well.

There is obviously something going on in the universe.  Coincidence?  I THINK NOT!

Previous Blog Name

Our Podcast

By the way, if you haven’t listened to the show check it out!  http://deepfriedbytes.com.