CIO reports on Forrester's study on the iPhone's shortcomings as a corporate solution.


From Forrester:

A high volume of IT operations professionals have reached out to Forrester over the past few weeks asking if Apple's iPhone should be on their list of internally supported devices. Not surprisingly, they're being challenged by their users to support the iPhone so employees can have their corporate email on the same device that allows them to listen to their favorite tunes and watch the hottest YouTube clips. Unfortunately, there are some limitations with the first generation of the iPhone that should prevent it from being added to enterprises' white list. Here's a top 10 list of reasons why Forrester recommends that IT not support the iPhone and why we don't consider it an enterprise-class mobile device. Despite this, Forrester predicts that the iPhone will find its way into many enterprise environments — if it hasn't already — because C-level executives are buying them and expecting support from IT. It's only a matter of time before the iPhone filters down the corporate pyramid, and IT should have a strategy to handle these requests.

As Ars Technica points out here,

...Forrester's report lists current shortcomings of the iPhone—even ones that -may be remedied in the future. For instance, the iPhone gets dinged for the lack of an official SDK for third-party applications, even though we know one is coming in a couple of months. The lack of extensive Exchange support is also mentioned, despite Apple job postings to the contrary.
The report does make a few good points, however, by mentioning both the lack of data encryption and the lack of any ability to remotely disable iPhones if they are lost or stolen. Most of the remaining reasons listed are design flaws more than IT-specific issues, such as the non-replaceable battery, carrier locks, and the multi-touch keyboard.

The Forrester report costs $295, so you might as well start with the CIO magazine article.