More evidence of iPhone's Exchange support and RSS reader

The kids over at ThinkSecret have some exclusive pics of what they purport to be interface shots of the iPhone. In these, we clearly see an RSS view thanks to the reader.mac.com URL, a previously unseen SIM loading procedure (requiring a paperclip), and what appears to be an Exchange email configuration tab. TS says that the iPhone supports Microsoft Exchange servers and has likely licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync. The latter dealio we've heard before and is certainly making corporate IT departments a bit fidgety. After all, more than a few CEOs will be demanding integration of their new toys come Monday morning. Jobs himself responded to a USA Today question about the lack of corporate email support with, "You'll be hearing more about this in the coming weeks. We have some pilots going with companies with names you'll recognize. This won't be a big issue." The fact that most of these pictures still sport the old Cingular logo certainly doesn't give us much confidence for an "iDay" release.

Update: As pointed out by a number of our readers, the Exchange tab likely configures IMAP4 access to Exchange like Apple's OS X Mail.app client. Made all the more likely by yesterday's "Rollup 3" release by Microsoft which fixes Mac related issues with Exchange 2007.

[france.justin @ Jun 29th 2007 3:22AM]

It'd be foolish to exclude corporate email in this thing.

I'm sure Apple employees are working on rev 1 and 2 right now, and all them early adopters will be bombarded with alot of minor and (hopefully) a few major revisions.

Besides the EDGE thing I reckon they'll come out on top of alot of criticism and shortcomings with quick s/w responses. Hopefully.

[derek @ Jun 29th 2007 3:41AM]

that's a huge reason people were worried about buying. now it seems that geeky-businessmen/women are going to get their iPhones..

[Chris M @ Jun 29th 2007 5:09AM]

I'm not so sure- derek. PUSH'ed e-mail is one thing; but if you have to respond via non-tactile feedback...

It's just impractical for business use- that's the bottom line. I'm not an iPhone fan, but I'm definitely an Apple fanboy. And when the learning curve on the keyboard of your device is [don't quote me] 'a few days' as preliminary reviewers are saying- the device won't be geared towards the corporate end-user.

I know Jobs says his target audience is 'everyone unhappy with their phone' or what have you- but with corporate America; you don't have a choice. Functionality takes precedence over fun menus and sleek design. The older model Blackberries weren't exactly show-stoppers; but they did their jobs, and do them well. Only lately do you see convergence between style and functionality aimed at the business market- for a while Pocket PCs/Blackberries/Treos were no-frills; and now we see the Blackberry Curve, Treo 680 (the one with no antenna?), and the Motorola Q/Dash/etc. - devices aimed for a business market; and hitting the style of a fashion-conscious 2000s America.

I believe the device including Exchange support is great, but the number of end-users that will take advantage of it, I don't think will be so high.

Just my two cents. Thanks for reading.

Chris

[L. M. Lloyd @ Jun 29th 2007 4:13AM]

This definitely makes the iPhone more viable as a smartphone. I would still be surprised if the integration is ActiveSync though. I would really expect that Apple would do what Palm did and license Good Technology, or do what Nokia did and license BlackBerry Connect. Historically licensing Microsoft technology to compete with a Microsoft product doesn't usually pan out so well.

[randy @ Jun 29th 2007 4:14AM]

$600!

[sam @ Jun 29th 2007 4:35AM]

I think you speculators have forgotten that "Exchange" is an option available in OS X Mail (right below POP and IMAP and .Mac) . It's all going through Outlook Web Access through WebDAV. I use Mail at home to access my Exchange account at work.

There's no fancy licensing going on.

[sam @ Jun 29th 2007 4:50AM]

i'll also mention that Entourage connects to Exchange the same way as OS X Mail (webdav). Someone please correct me if i'm wrong.

[James @ Jun 29th 2007 4:45AM]

MacMail does exchange as well and as far as i was aware fundamentally its just an IMAP wrapper. I'd expect that if this is the case then this works in much the same way.

[chris @ Jun 29th 2007 4:50AM]

So maybe someone with more IT knowledge can share -- does this 'standard' way of supporting exchange as an 'IMAP wrapper' (or is it WebDAV) provide security and authentication that corporate sys admins are going to be comfortable with?

It's great that Macs (and the iphone apparently) support Exchange servers out of the box -- but is the support secure and robust? Or using an approach that some IT dept's might take issue with when sending emails with attached financial documents, sensitive press releases, etc..

[halfeatenfish @ Jun 29th 2007 5:12AM]

If I may add, since I use a mac in a windows environ. Mail.app accesses exchange via IMAP, which requires IT to "throw a switch" on Exchange server to make it work. I didn't even bother to ask about it, BECAUSE...

Entourage uses WebDAV. Now, my place uses outlook web access (not sure if thats available in exchange all default). I found Entourage access much more convenient than Outlook 2003. Reason: Outlook required me to be on my local subnet (or use our clunky VPN), whereas Entourage was secure worldwide with no reconfigs and no vpn. Caveat: MS doesn't seem to enable all of their outlook/exchange options over WebDAV.

Also, Safari (full version 2) can access exchange via OWA, so may be another option for the phone.

[sam @ Jun 29th 2007 6:17AM]

I did do a bit of googling, and although I couldn't find any official answer to how Mail.app talks to Exchange, the general consensus seems to be that it uses IMAP to fetch the mail and uses WebDAV/OWA to fetch the folder structure and filter out the things Mail.app can't handle (calendars, tasks, address books). There are separate fields for OWA and Exchange server

[Ivan @ Jun 29th 2007 8:13AM]

This is a good point. Starting tomorrow, my company will be blocking all smartphones that do not meet our security requirements (blackberrys and WinMo 5/6 ... no palm). So even if it does have "Exchange" support, it doesn't mean that it will be supported by companies. At a minumum, you are looking at several months of delays while companies do their testing.

[smiler @ Jun 29th 2007 5:40AM]

This looks more likely to be an implementation of Mail's Exchange support. It requires the IMAP option to be enabled on the Exchange server - it works almost identically to Entourage. Mail's Exchange "support" is a little buggy; avoided by configuring the Exchange account as IMAP instead of Exchange.

Something I haven't seen mentioned is IMAP's potential for PUSH email. It's built into the IMAP4 protocol and would work on my SE K610i if I had the data-plan to afford it! This is how Entourage and Mail deliver email asap.

[Taylor @ Jun 29th 2007 5:49AM]

Hoping that these are true, should help push the iPhone to a bigger bit of success than it is.

I myself won't be buying one till features of my $150-outright Sony Ericsson phone, like music as ringtones, MMS, and video from the camera, are on this thing. On the whole though, the iPhone is a pretty damn cool thing - and yes, the "bling factor" is off the scale

[andy @ Jun 29th 2007 11:10AM]

How is it a success when Apple has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into this thing and has zero revenue?

It's 11am in the Eastern time zone. The revenue stream from the iPhone is exactly $0 at this moment.

I'm not saying it won't BE successful, but it's definitely far from it at this point.

[Craig @ Jun 29th 2007 6:45AM]

Exchange mail support is great, but what about other Exchange data - Contacts, Calendar? Do we have any guesses as to whether the iPhone will be able to sync these as well?

[Anto @ Jun 29th 2007 7:05AM]

Man this phone ROCKS!! But I heard Apple hasn't made enough units to meet demand. I think Apple really should of sorted this, it just ain't good enough Apple!! :(

[PEZ @ Jun 29th 2007 7:24AM]

Thanks for that arrow, I never would have seen it.

[Karim @ Jun 29th 2007 11:38AM]

The way Entourage "supports" Exchange is retarded: it uses IMAP for mail messages, WebDAV for calendaring, and LDAP for address lists/contacts. It feels like three different technologies held together with chewing gum. All of which works but sucks performance- & feature-wise compared to a native MAPI client like Outlook.

I am *hoping* having Exchange on a separate tab means support for Exchange ActiveSync ("Direct Push Technology"). This is based on HTTPS and XML and shouldn't be impossible for Apple to implement, given a licensing agreement. The only complicated part is getting the server's SSL cert on the mobile device. This would allow synchronization of calendars and contacts in addition to email. It's also really FAST compared to the alternative (which is polling your mailbox via IMAP every few minutes).

Having a separate "Exchange" tab just for IMAP would be disappointing....

[Russell @ Jun 29th 2007 1:57PM]

It is going to be just IMAP.

Because apple users are generally stupid folk, and Exchange IMAP requires a funky username command based on the domain, mailbox name, and user name all run together depending on whether username is the same as the mailbox alias etc it's going to just ask for those fields and make the username for you behind the scenes.

Apple users can't figure out DOMAIN/USERNAME/MAILBOX for IMAP and DOMAIN\USERNAME\MAILBOX for POP3 even when given specific instructions from IT.

And there's no way I'm opening POP3/IMAP on any of my Exchange clients. We use HTTPS RPC or encrypted VPN only.

[Michael Emmons @ Jun 29th 2007 1:51PM]

Why does everyone keep pointing to the fact that it says "Cingular" instead of "AT&T" as proof it must be a fake or old or something? I'm in downtown San Francisco right now and my phone says "Cingular." When I'm at my house in L.A. it also says "Cingular." The reconfiguration of the cell towers to output AT&T instead of Cingular is hardly ubiquitous at this point.

[Craig M. @ Jul 29th 2007 5:55PM]

I work for a hosted Exchange company and can therefore provide some insight as to the 3 major Enterprise level forms of email that might work for iPhone. Blackberry connect is worthless as it doesn't provide full replication of the Exchange mailbox for non-Blackberry devices (have yet to have a customer that likes Blackberry-connect on their non-Blackberry phones). Goodlink is a "stand-alone" piece of software that utilizes it's own features outside of the host PDA OS and therefore wouldn't integrate seamlessly into the iPhone, so it in effect would defeat the seamless integration of iPhone which makes it a non-starter as well. Licensing Active Synch to wirelessly slip-stream the Exchange mailbox data into the iPhone features (Email, Calendar, Contacts; Tasks--not currently available on iPhone: NOTES doesn't synch wirelessly w/ Active Synch)is the only thing that makes any sense for the iPhone product. Active Synch is built into Exchange server so the licensing is relatively inexpensive (no separate server licensing).

This should be relatively simple requiring only some setup options for Active Synch and possibly creating a TASK application if iPhone was to take advantage of ActiveSynch wireless Tasks (which are rudimentary anyway and hardly worth the trouble). My guess is that Apple wants to create a relatively large "splash" with their first iPhone software/firmware update and providing true enterprise-level Exchange compatibility via Active Synch would solve the biggest hole in the feature set and make for a nice "told-you-so-we-can-update-the-device" announcement for Apple's iPhone upgrade release. As far as I'm concerned, if Apple provides Exchange compatibility first, some of the other bells and whistles can wait.