One of the not-so-small items included in Apple’s announcement/demo of the iPhone SDK was licensing of Microsoft’s ActiveSync/Exchange built-in to the next release of the phone OS.
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Exchange support in the iPhone has been rumored almost as long as the iPhone itself was rumored to exist. Much as the iPhone turned out to be real, so has ActiveSync on the iPhone.
Microsoft released an interview with Terry Myerson, corporate vice president for Exchange, which includes a very interesting tidbit. Mr. Myserson says that Apple and Microsoft were in talks about licensing ActiveSync before the iPhone was announced.
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Furthermore, he was in daily contact with Apple VP Phil Schiller (when Schiller wasn’t making up Apple rumors, of course) for two weeks while they set the details of the agreement between the two tech giants.
This isn’t a revelation, since it stands to reason that a company in the business of selling a smart phone and another company in the business of selling technology for smart phones would work together but it is interesting nonetheless.
Everyone was so busy preparing whines about Apple secrecy, they didn’t snoop Microsoft about what was coming down the pike.
All I have to say is – Finally! Not sure if my company wants to sign up for the Beta program though.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/apply/
I think it’s good. Nice to see companies working with each other rather then in different directions.
This is an excerpt from an email that I sent to the rest of the IT staff.
“I was really getting tired of explaining to people that they would have to manually sync their calendar and contacts through iTunes. Also for IMAP email to work on the iPhone you have to first connect via IMAP using Outlook/Thunderbird before hand, otherwise it just errors out. Even better you can’t manually set the server ports during the initial setup. So you have let it error out, save settings, and then you can go back and set them.”
Activesync is server name, user name, password, and then you are done.”
I was so opposed to supporting the iPhone, but enough VPs requested it that IT was “obligated” to support IMAP email on our exchange server so people could use their iPhones.
Then guess who got to be the one to support all of the iPhone users? all I have to say is about fricking time.
It’s also nice that this is a direct link between the iPhone and the Exchange server, and doesn’t require another intermediate step like the Blackberry solution requires.
I wonder how many corporate users have actually bothered waiting for ActiveSync before buying an iPhone, how many would want to stay with their Berries and Windows, and what role existing contracts will play.
In other words, will it be another tsunami of customers for Apple/ATT or a slower, steadier stream?
#5 – Just to restate the obvious: iPhone sales already outnumber the sum of sales of all Windows-based smart phones. Second to Crackberries in under a year.
More interesting is the obvious potential for additional service vendors once the 1st 2-year cycle with AT&T is up.
Will AT&T fork over enough to keep the “exclusivity”? The 3G combo will be out in another quarter.
#6,
You are mistaken. The iPhone Only has about 30% of the market share of windows based smartphones. Also, now that Apple is licensing Active Sync from Microsoft, the iPhone basically IS a windows smart phone.
Also, when I look at the demo software from the SDK release yesterday, it lines up exactly with what I thought the market for the iPhone would be. The single business application they showed was salesforce… This is a device for remote data entry.
And quite frankly, if you look at Apples demographics and where Apple is going with the SDK, Nintendo and Sony have much more to fear from the iPhone than Microsoft. After all, Microsoft is now getting a cut from each and every iPhone sold.
This will definitely help Apple with military sales. When all you need to buy is the phone/plan and can connect it directly to the Exchange server, instead of having to spend extra and train up admins on Blackberry server so critical mail can be accessed on the road, everyone wins.
It will be interesting to see how this works out and how well the two work together down the road.
Of all the Microsoft software I hate, ActiveSync is at the top of the list. Hopefully Apple will just use the outlook hooks without the actual application in order to get email.