It remains to be seen whether or not business users will be breaking their crackberry addictions when the iPhone launches next week, but a couple of features could sway you at the last minute. I know a few of you have asked us to cease and desist all coverage of the iPhone from here on out, but hey, there’s nothing else worth telling you about.
The iPhone will ship with the standard OS X VPN client, which allows connections to Mac and Windows VPN Servers on L2TP or PPTP over IPSEC. There are a few rumors swirling about that Cisco is working on a VPN client and Soft Phone integration into the Call Manager Server as well as e-mail functionality of IMAP over SSL. Take that Gartner!
Leopard’s Quick Look will make viewing Word and Excel documents a breeze on the iPhone, but unfortunately you won’t be able to edit them unless you jump to Google Docs & Spreadsheets via Safari. The awesomeness that is Quick Look will play nice with most every file type you’ll encounter, which will cement its case for business users to jump on board.
iPhone for Business, Features OSX-Level VPN and Quick Look for Word and Excel Files [9to5Mac]
The iphone is old news and soo over reported. I might take a vacation from the internet this week just so I don’t see or read iphone garbage…lol
I like how engadget has a rss feed without iphone articles. I wish other blogs would do the same (hint hint). I enjoy reading this blog, but iphone has infested you guys too!
Sorry, Remo. We’ll try not to overwhelm you with iPhone news this week, but I can’t speak for everyone else.
Maybe you know something I don’t Peter, but last time I checked (right now) Google Docs and Spreadsheets doesn’t work on Safari. Google still considers it an unsupported browser and recommends using Firefox or Camino. Is this going to be different in Leopard?
I’d be one of the first in line on the 29th if iPhone spoke SSH.
There are sure to be a number of 3rd party “web 2.0″ ajax-based ssh solutions for the iPhone. Here’s one:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mressl/webshell/
What business user that hasn’t just come back from a three martini lunch would give up a Blackberry for a device that doesn’t do push email and doesn’t properly sync with an exchange server? It’s a nice little device if you have 600 bucks to drop, but it neither is, nor was ever intended to be, a Blackberry killer. And adding VPN is far less useful to the average non-IT business user than what Apple left out.
the funny thing, people always think that VPN is business only, well my college (Indiana University) used VPN over IPsec for their wireless, the whole campus is wireless, so if this rumor is true, the iPhone would be a free (no data plan) internet device for email, iChat, and Facebook, which college kids seem to check atleast twice every 10 minutes. Apple will hit big with the crowd that want to have the latest/greatest but also the ones who see how useful the iPhone really is