Using iPhone as a Business Tool
The debate rages on - is iPhone any good for business? Yes it is. Find out how you can use it to energize your business.
Until recently, iPhone’s suitability for businesses was a raging debate. But by now the verdict is near unanimous - it is too beautiful, user friendly and powerful a device to be merely the end consumers’ baby.Apple, iPhone’s creators, too has woken up to this fact, and the ability to download powerful 3rd party applications onto the iPhone device is slated to be introduced soon. Until then, iPhone allows equally powerful web 2.0 applications to be played through its Safari web browser.
The advantages of using iPhone for your business are:-
1) A powerful computing device which keeps you connected with business information, but fits in your pocket.
2) Get rid of those heavy laptops.
3) Reports show that people are ever more open to use iPhone to access the internet than any other mobile device.
4) iPhone’s beauty and power wins it many hearts. Employees with iPhone’s will gladly use it for business purposes when theyre on the road.
5) Quicker decision making and speed to market, since employees can access and collaborate on critical information when they need it.
Buy your iPhone device
Assuming you don't have iPhone already; this obviously is the first step. Since the iPhone distribution market is very organized, there wont be many price differentials.
Try: Visit the official Apple instruction page on the subject. The three places you can buy your iPhone are official Apple Stores, AT&T outlets, or the Apple Online Store. If you are looking for a bargain, eBay could be another option.
Get a Messaging Solution
According to a recent Rubicon study, the major reason for iPhone internet usage was mail access. Even otherwise, the foremost business use of a computing device is the ability to access and send official mail. Secondarily, the ability to access official contacts, calendars and tasks. For a majority of small businesses this means the ability to access Outlook information. Unfortunately, iPhone does not provide native MS Exchange support at this time and there is no direct way to access Outlook information. But there are some powerful web applications which surmount this difficulty and allow easy Outlook access.
Try: The first option to access Outlook on iPhone is Outlook Web Access (OWA). But some drawbacks of this are that OWA’s appearance is chunky on iPhone, full feature access is not available, and you need Exchange to be installed. Powerful web applications like HyperOffice, on the other hand, are optimized for iPhone, offer near full access to Outlook on iPhone, go further and allow Outlook calendars, tasks, and contacts to be shared with colleagues, and work even if Exchange is not installed on the company servers. Alternatively, if you don’t want to go the MS Outlook way at all, you can use purely web based email solutions like Gmail.
Get a Collaboration Solution
Corporate email access is the bare bones necessity if iPhone is to be used as a business tool. But it neednt stop there, and there are many web applications that allow iPhone to be used as a full fledged collaboration tool wherein users can share and work togather on information right from their iPhone devices - documents, contacts, calendars, tasks etc.
Try: One approach could be to buy ad-hoc solutions for different needs. Google Apps or Zimbra are a purely web based Office suite which let you collaborate in real time on documents. If youre looking for an all in one solution, HyperOffice in addition to its messaging capabilities, allows sharing of tasks, calendars, contacts and documents. It also fits well if you use MS Office to manage information at your office. Alternatively you could browse Apple’s webapp directory and look for suitable solutions.
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