Kurt Shintaku's Blog

What this means in English is that the Apple iPhone will, sometime in the future, be able to securely connect to a corporate Exchange infrastructure over the Internet and receive pushed emails, and also synchronize contacts & calendar data.  Apple has also announced that they will be providing "remote wipe capability" but I haven’t heard anything beyond that.  Apple will be doing the development of this technology – however nothing appears to have been completed yet as the licensing has just been completed.

Official Microsoft PressPass information here:
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/Features/2008/mar08/03-06EASqa.mspx

This is exciting news obviously because it provides corporate users with the opportunity to pull Exchange Server email down to yet another converged phone/PDA device.  The thing to remember however is that although Apple’s licensed Exchange ActiveSync, that doesn’t mean that they will be close to parity in terms of functionality that is provided by Windows Mobile-based devices.  Apple still has to build that functionality into the iPhone, and as you can see, no company really builds all of it.

• Look at Right Management technology for example:  If you receive a Rights-managed email with policies around it and encryption, the only way to read it on a mobile phone is by using a Windows Mobile device.  (This is one of my FAVORITE features of my Samsung i760 Windows Mobile phone)
• And what about HTML email?  This isn’t an easy feature at ALL despite what you might think.  Consuming & formatting an email that’s encoded in HTML is very difficult.  The only device that currently provides this today with Exchange ActiveSync is Windows Mobile.
• How about S-MIME support?  Encrypted emails?  Remember those?  Well, they require certificate technology.  Emails that require certificate registration on the device and decryption, reencryption:  Only Windows Mobile has this capability.  Not to mention the management of those certificates.

So you see, there are 20+ licensees of Exchange ActiveSync and none of them other than Windows Mobile provide a truly complete set of Enterprise features. 

Look at the table I have below.  This is an example of 5 users of Exchange ActiveSync and as you can see despite licensing the protocol and the framework, none of them match the complete feature set provided by Windows Mobile.