Companies Working to Bring Support for Exchange Server to the iPhone

Apple designed the iPhone for consumers, but that hasn't stopped many people from wanting to use this new smartphone for business, especially to get their work email.

As it stands now, though, the iPhone is not able to securely access corporate email servers. To access a company account with this device would require opening up a hole in the company's firewall to give SMTP or IMAP access, something few IT managers will agree to.

Fortunately for those who aren't interested in the in-and-outs of corporate security and just want to get the work email on their new iPhone, there are some solutions in development.

However, both of these have a significant drawback: they must be installed on an on a corporate email server by the IT department; they're not something that end users can install themselves. Therefore the user's company must officially support the iPhone, something few have done so far.

Synchronica Mobile Gateway

The Synchronica Mobile Gateway can provide wireless synchronization of calendar, address book, tasks, notes, and email between an iPhone and Microsoft Exchange.

It uses Microsoft's secure Outlook Web Access (OWA) to retrieve email from the corporate Exchange server, a service enabled by many enterprises to provide users with access to email from home or while traveling.

Mobile Gateway 3.0 is available now. More information is available on the Synchronica web site.

Visto

Visto Corporation is developing an application that can be installed on a corporate network that will give iPhone users secure access to current and legacy versions of both Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino corporate messaging platforms.

Visto for the iPhone is expected to be available in September. More details can be found on Visto's web site.

Apple?

Late last month, ZDnet ran an unconfirmed report that Apple will soon announce that it has licensed the Exchange ActiveSync protocol, which will bring Microsoft's push email and remote synchronization systems to the iPhone.

This solution would also require companies to install an upgrade to the Exchange servers, but this is available from Microsoft for free, and is used by a wide variety of other smartphones, including both Windows Mobile and Palm OS devices.

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