What iOS 4 Does (and Doesn't Do) For Business

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman investigates what businesses can expect from Apple's new iOS 4. Multitasking, the biggest new capability, is for now simply a promise, as apps will need to be retrofitted to make use of the capability. The other big new capability for IT, a set of APIs that allow BlackBerry-like management of the iPhone, such as auditing of policies and apps, over-the-air provisioning of apps without iTunes, and over-the-air configuration and policy management, also remains in the realm of promise, as the various mobile management tools that have been reworked to take advantage of the new iOS 4 capabilities won't be available until July or later. And despite the fact that email works more as it does on the desktop, iOS 4 still fails to deliver several email capabilities key to business users, including zipped attachment management, junk mail filtering, message rules, and message flagging."

Comments

Email capabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

iOS 4 still fails to deliver several email capabilities key to business users, including zipped attachment management, junk mail filtering, message rules, and message flagging.

What F'd up sadistic moron would push the junk mail filtering, message rules, and flagging down to the client? Wouldn't that mean that each client would be configured separately? I always set up that stuff so the user can configure it at the server level so that their laptop, desktop, phone, etc all are seeing the same exact mailstore. These are probably the same people that considering having "Sent Items" only stored on the actual device that did the sending be the way to go.

Re:Email capabilities

[nine-times]

If you're the user and your server isn't doing a good enough job filtering junk mail, then you'll want junk filtering in the client. And regardless of that, you may want support for configuring your junk mail options in the client, such as marking messages as junk for bayesian analysis. Same basic idea for the rest of this stuff.

Part of the problem is that email itself isn't very well designed for how most of us currently use email. It's simple, which is nice, but it's not built to address complex filtering/tagging workflows.

Re:Email capabilities

[WCguru42]

I have four smartphones.

Really? Why? Please tell me you don't have four hip holsters.

Yes, I did read the rest of your post. No, it still doesn't make sense.

Re:Email capabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPhone does not have client filters, client spam management, or client-based flagging. Of those three, the only one that actually makes sense on the client is flagging.

Filtering at the client level only makes sense if you only have one client, are using POP3, and are storing the messages on the client. That's really not a good idea with a phone - you'll have synchronization collisions, you'll find that some mail is missing on your phone that was present on your laptop/desktop, etc. If you're using a phone and a desktop/laptop as mail clients, you want to use IMAP (on *all* your clients) and do all the rules and filtering and spam management on the server, use the iPhone client as a window into your mail account's various folders, and use a desktop or laptop for archiving.

Flagging, on the other hand, makes sense - if it's manual flagging (I'm referring to what in IMAP is called IMAP keywords or labels; the term 'flag' in IMAP actually refers to the message state - read, draft, etc.). The workaround for an iPhone is to create a "flagged" folder (in IMAP) and move emails to that folder to represent flagged emails (if you are using a rule to flag things, do that on the server; if you are flagging manually, use the iPhone to move the email). However, I'd love to see flagging and tagging (i.e., IMAP keywords) that can be pushed back to the IMAP server on an iPhone.

Re:Email capabilities

[nine-times]

I've seen plenty of people use Outlook's "Rules", even some relatively non-technical people. One of the problems there is that mail servers (excepting Exchange) don't usually have good server-side filtering along with client-side configuration of that filtering.

I don't bother setting up client-side filtering on my personal email account because it only works if that client, and I don't always check my email from the same client.

I don't bother tagging my email because it's not something that's handled consistently and most of the time it's client-side only. So if I spend lots of time tagging my email and using those tags, and then I move to another client, those tags are all missing. Worse: if I delete my client's settings without backing up the tagging information, all that information simply goes away. Exchange allows categories (basically tags) to be stored on the server-side, but they're inaccessible by mail clients other than Outlook.

Also, I can't send tags. Like if I'm sending an email to my boss and I tag it as "budget", he doesn't get that tag when he receives that email. When he replies, the reply isn't tagged either. It's just not a very well thought out system.

Re:Email capabilities

[mini me]

I bring in far more money to the company than you ever will.

If four different email views are critical to your operation, it sounds to me like your IT staff are the ones bringing in the money.

Re:Email capabilities

[Em Ellel]

You are indeed an F'd up sadistic moron. Really. Do you carry four pair of pants with you at all times? One for general use and the other three for your major customers. Holy fuckin' shit.

That would be silly, there is no need for separate pants for each major customer.

But you do need a separate belt for each belt-clip on each phone... so each belt would need a separate pants.... oh, crap, I guess he does need separate pants ;-)

-Em

Re:Email capabilities

[Em Ellel]

Please don't try to make sensible posts on Slashdot, it might explode the fanboys heads in the basement.

"haha, Its funny cuz its true"

Re:Email capabilities

[afidel]

Hahaha, sounds like someone who hasn't grasped the concept of a smartphone. I can literally do everything I can do on a laptop on my phone just slightly slower. That's why despite bringing my laptop on my last trip out of town it was only used to watch movies because everything else was taken care of from my phone. I wouldn't have even brought the laptop except I was on call last week and needed to be able to respond at 100% efficiency if there had been an outage. My CEO and chairman of the board both have laptops that are almost never with them, they do all their work away from the office on their Blackberry. It's why email and BES are our highest SLA'd items in the entire infrastructure, email downtime gets more notice than an outage in our ERP system (not that either are common).

As a former Blackberry user...

[unsmashed]

One thing I miss is the ability to do different notifications based on filters / profiles set up. The Blackberry can do this by flagging certain messages as a "Level 1 Notification" and then you can set normal messages to come in quietly, but Level 1 messages can vibrate, ring, whatever you configure it to do. It's great to get notified when your boss or superior email you, but let the other 200 emails a day just collect quietly.

The other feature I wish existed is when I reply to a message on my iPhone, that it shows up in Outlook as replied to (via the Exchange ActiveSync). Without it, there's sometimes confusion whether I've replied to this or not when reviewing the emails on my desktop.

Re:As a former Blackberry user...

[Polo]

I agree.

And Calendar appointments too. The default alarm is short, doesn't repeat and completely ineffective.

Some appointments are life-threatening if you miss them: Pick up the kids, tax audit, anniversary...

The mac

[Itninja]

Reminds me of a Mac commercial parody from years ago:
'You know all the games for the Mac are great because you played them a PC three years ago'

The iPhone, with its quality touch screen and beautiful, lickable looks, continues to announce 'amazing new features' that have been available in Blackberrys (Blackberries?) for nearly a decade.

Re:The mac

[archmcd]

The politically correct term is actually "berries of color."

Re:The mac

[UnknowingFool]

A Blackberry started as a business smartphone and has slowly added features to be more consumer friendly. Apple is coming from the other direction. It is a consumer smartphone first with some business features added later. Both phones continue to be strong in their initial markets but is somewhat lacking in other markets.

Re:The mac

[delinear]

Congratulations on missing the point that Apple bring lashings of user experience (shiny looks, one of the first workable mobile touch-screen interfaces, an easy to use app store) but that's often at the cost of basic functionality which other devices have offered as standard for years. We can all agree that improvements to the UI are important, but for some people the underlying functionality is more important and that's where Apple are slow to deliver, and often come across as disingenuous when they do (for instance, you'd be forgiven, having read the mainstream media the last few days, for thinking they invented multi-tasking, when not long ago they were busy explaining why it was such a bad idea for mobile devices - they'd get far more good will by just saying, "we were wrong, we've listened to your requests and here's your multi-tasking").

Re:The mac

[nine-times]

Yeah, I got kind of sold on the "it's even better than the iPhone" Android hype and got myself an HTC Incredible. Now obviously this is a matter of personal needs and personal preference, but I now consider that purchase to be a mistake.

For one thing, and this is only the most blatant problem, the damned thing crashes all the time. It's not too bad, but I feel it vibrate in my pocket, and when I check the phone, it's rebooting. But all in all, it's a pretty minor problem.

The bigger problem, though more subtle, is that the UI design is kind of a mess. I don't mean "the GUI is not pretty", but that the user interaction is unclear. For example, calendar events pop up in the notification area, but if you clear that notification, you have not dismissed it; it will pop up again in a couple minutes. Or there's a "favorites" widget for your favorite contacts that notifies you when those contacts' Facebook status has been updated, but if you press on that notification, it immediately calls that contact.

More generally, a lot of the user interaction is hidden in context menus and under the menu button. It's sometimes unclear what hitting a given button will actually do. I feel like I'm constantly jumping through hoops to get the damned thing to do what I want.

To my mind, it doesn't matter "who did it first". The question is, right now, what's the best phone you can buy. As far as I'm concerned, the iPhone is it.

Re:The mac

[s73v3r]

Who gives a fuck who did it first. The iPhone does it now, that's all that matters. You can say, "But... but my phone did it FIRST!" all you want, and nobody else is going to care.

Re:The mac

[Ryvar]

Honestly what Apple have done isn't so much listening to developer's requests as it is fulfilling those requests to the greatest extent possible *without compromising user experience*.

Not compromising user experience, even potentially, appears to be their guiding principle and it's served them well. Slashdot will never love Apple because they aren't the target market. I, like a lot of people who swear by the iPhone - actively want appliance computing when it comes to a smart phone. I actively want the walled gardens of the XBox 360, PS3, Appstore, Wii, and even Steam, because these things substantially reduce malware and/or cheaters. I understand that it is fundamental to the basic principals of a Turing machine that they can never eliminate these things (ie virtual machines, etc.), merely reduce to a level unlikely to affect me. But in practice that's all I need, much like how in practice I only *need* 256-bit TLS for securing online purchases.

The antagonism seen towards Apple on Slashdot is due to the fact that it's an explosively growing market segment that isn't targeted for the core Slashdot demographic. It implies that the world is moving on from them, and nobody likes to hear that.

--Ryv

Re:The mac

[mr_matticus]

for instance, you'd be forgiven, having read the mainstream media the last few days, for thinking they invented multi-tasking, when not long ago they were busy explaining why it was such a bad idea for mobile devices

No, you wouldn't be forgiven. Apple did not invent multitasking, and nobody with a brain or a clue says that they did. They also never claimed that it was a bad idea for mobile devices. They said the current implementations were bad for mobile devices in their opinion, and historically there has been support for those claims.

As is evident from copy/paste, multitasking, and several other features, Apple takes the time to get the implementation right and make the features more accessible to a wider audience, and what they trumpet as new isn't the feature, but their take on it. Jobs has said about several such developments, "we're not the first, but we're the first to get it right" or something to that effect. There is room to disagree with that development approach or whether Apple's method really is better for any given personal preference, but the only thing disingenuous about it are people who fail to identify context for the sake of making a snide remark.

Re:The mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're out of date. It's "African-American Berry".

Gotta love when editors get a bit choppy on that sort of thing. Like the add copy I saw for an "African-American Corvette" in the paper a few years back. (It was a car. It happened to be painted *black*. That makes it a black Corvette, not an African-American one.)

Or the article about a local flower show where the references to "pansies" (a flower) was replaced with "homosexuals" to avoid being deemed insensitive.

Re:The mac

[imthesponge]

That Apple logo costs a lot of money. That's why it matters.

A few related stories

[guanxi]

Much to my surprise, there has been a lot of press coverage about the iOS 4 in the enterprise:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177830/iPhone_4_iOS_4_offer_deeper_enterprise_support

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/062110-five-ways-apples-ios-4.html

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/062110-iphone-ios4-apis-management.html

http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/06/07/iphone-os-4-0-now-ios-is-here/

Email design decisions

[fermion]

including zipped attachment management, junk mail filtering, message rules, and message flagging.

I am surprised that all these capability are needed for a mobile client. In particular, i would think corporate would want to junk email filtering at the server, otherwise there would be risk that an individual user might overfilter.

Likewise zipped attachments are something that is used for desktop, but I don't know why anyone would use them on a mobile device, but then I don't see why i get memos in MS Word format instead of PDF. Sometimes the feature bloat drives the bad habits. I suppose that on some mobile devices application installation might happen through email.

I would also like to see message rule and flagging pushed back to the server. I might be using one of four machines to look at mail. Everything is stored on the server. Keeping the rules consistant on all machines can be a pain. It would be much better to be able to set up one server to check mail, then reroute, then all the other machines feed off that. When I used to one machines going all the time at home, this more or less happened.

In any case many of these complaints seem more about wanting to do things the old fashion way rather than genuine functionality. It is like complaining that Python does not have a traditional for...next loop. Get over it.

Multitasking as defined by Apple

[not already in use]

Why do we accept Apple's glorified Suspend/Resume functionality as "multitasking?" Can my app be performing tasks in the background while I'm using another application? No? Well that's not multitasking then, is it?

Re:Multitasking as defined by Apple

[nine-times]

Can my app be performing tasks in the background while I'm using another application?

Yes. Apple has made it so that your entire application won't continue to run in the background, but that you can still have your application "performing tasks" (so long as it fits within the supported background "tasks").

From what I understand, Android does something similar. It's not crazy. It actually makes a whole hell of a lot of sense. If I'm reading an ebook, for example, I don't need to have my iPhone's system resources taken up trying to display a particular page that won't be displayed anyway because it's in the background. On a device with limited resources, it's better to suspend that whole application to free up resources.

So similarly with a browser, you don't need your browser actually trying to display web pages that aren't being displayed. All you need to do is enable background downloading. Downloading is pretty much the only thing that you actually want a browser to do in the background. Pretty much the only thing you want Skype to do in the background is receive calls. Pretty much the only thing you want Pandora to do in the background is download streaming audio and output it to the headphones-- you don't need Pandora to try to render album art that won't be displayed.

Re:Multitasking as defined by Apple

[shawnce]

If your app plays audio (for whatever reason) it WILL run in the background. (audio background mode)

If your VoIP app needs to maintain a network connection with a backend system so it can be told of incoming calls it WILL run in the background but only when network traffic is incoming or at a time you designate so you can keep your network connection alive. (voip background mode)

If your app needs to track your location it WILL run in the background with the level of location accuracy you designate. (location background mode)

(you can combine any combination of the above modes)

If your app needs to finish an active task, one that is not easily paused, it WILL run in the background.

If your application needs to do things at predetermined time you can schedule it and your app WILL run in the background.

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/BackgroundExecution/BackgroundExecution.html

Re:Multitasking as defined by Apple

[Late Adopter]

The problem lies wherein you want an API to do something, and it doesn't.

FTFY. This isn't in any way a new problem. Witness Hildon/Maemo, and Android. They all have approaches for handling multiple user-interfacing applications and how they interact with power management. Apple has chosen an approach, and it looks good enough for 99% of use cases. Everyone who is still complaining at this point will continue to do so until they get real preemptive multithreading, which is not necessarily wise to allow for arbitrary apps on a mobile platform.

Even more generally than all that: An API does something, but you want it to do something else? Name me an API that *doesn't* have that problem. Combating feature creep and having a consistent and sensible development paradigm is really *hard*, and it looks like Apple is serious about it.

Re:Multitasking as defined by Apple

[bluefoxlucid]

I often find myself alt-tabbing away from the browser on my Android device to talk on IRC while pages load, only to come back and find the browser was suspended in the background. Fuck.

Re:Multitasking as defined by Apple

[shutdown -p now]

Yes. Apple has made it so that your entire application won't continue to run in the background, but that you can still have your application "performing tasks" (so long as it fits within the supported background "tasks").

From what I understand, Android does something similar.

It does, but it also does proper background threads. They are complementary techniques, and the former is not a proper replacement for the latter.

Re:trolling reply is trolling.

[Ephemeriis]

A missing detail is a "huge fail"? Uh oh, someone's lost their sense of scale meter!

I dunno. Seems to me that a smartphone should let you dial pretty much anything that looks like a phone number from pretty much anywhere. It's just text, right? Add some ability to select it and automatically copy/paste the digits into the dialing interface. Doesn't seem that hard to me.

The alternative is to make people manually copy & paste those digits into the dialing interface, or write them out and dial them in manually - both of which seem more awkward than they should be.

Especially when it is the location field of a meeting. I'll frequently schedule conference calls on my calendar, and put the phone number in the location field.

No mention of Data Protection?

[bds1986]

I'm kind of surprised the article didn't make any mention of iOS 4's improved data protection methods:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4175

In short, the previously flawed encryption method of the 3GS is improved by encrypting the hardware encryption keys with your passcode. Additionally, passcodes can now be alphanumeric and longer than 4 characters.

If you're using a 3GS and have upgraded to 4.0, you'll need to wipe and restore the phone to take advantage of this (data protection, not the passcode), the link above has details.

Unzipping actually would be nice

[hellfire]

Junk mail, rules, and filtering absolutely should happen at the server level if you are using Exchange or IMAP, and any business still using POP for email is just shooting themselves in the foot for not understanding their tech better.

However, unzipping would be kind of nice. People send attachments to each other all the time, and email servers have attachment limits. New iPhone users will also have limited data bandwidth. It would be nice if someone could send me that file zipped to 20-50% so I could save time. It takes less time to download files than it does to unzip them and in advanced situations with larger files every little bit helps. Granted, you may be correct in that there are better solutions than trying to email me a 250 MB spreadsheet on a device that probably can't display it in a sophisticated manner.

Poor Apple

[sootman]

They've only sold a few tens of millions of those things so far, and their new model took five whole hours to sell 600k units to regular customers, sight unseen. They'd better get their act together and start reaching out to the enterprise or that thing's gonna tank and take them with it.

Re:So what

[h4rr4r]

This is not true. The warranty on the camaro for anything GM could not prove the chip did stays in place. This is a law that needs to apply to more than just cars.
I say this as someone who voided the warranty on his droid by flashing it.

Re:multitasking is a lie

[Kenja]

"they don't trust you to be a good programmer"

Have you seen the stuff in the app store? They're not wrong.

Re:multitasking is a lie

[dhobbit]

It is "Multitasking done right" on a mobile platform. Apps that need to run in the background can provided they use a provided system service, audio, VoIP, launchd. The most important issue here is battery life and the second is memory which lead directly to the third which is performance. Developers always develop in a vacuum they didn't know what else will be running on the end users device and they have to assume that their app is the most important. Apple is just reenforcing that assumption If they want to play nice then they have to add a bunch of hacks and bloat in order to know when they should scale back CPU and memory usage to allow foreground apps to take over. This assumes a much more competent developer a lot more code. Apple is provided a shortcut, here's an API that can do all this work for you so you can solve the problem they're coding for not spend days writing glue and house keeping code. So to that end Apple provides a set of Legos for the devs to play with, the dev is not expected to build their own interlocking bricks and in actively discourage from doing so.

Still fails to deliver?

[drumcat]

Still fails to deliver outdated 1990s email paradigms that only the stodgiest of business users still care about. Flags? Really? If flags are that big a deal, use Gmail via MobileSafari. And show me one phone that junk filters. Damn troll article. How did this actually get posted?

Re:You're absolutely clueless, aren't you?

[Em Ellel]

Please give me the name of the company you work for, as well as the address of the location you're at. I want to make sure I never deal with them.

I get a sense the feeling would be mutual and appreciated.

He probably has four separate phones because he has four separate phone numbers, and needs to be able to at least accept voicemail messages if more than one of his major clients call at the same time.

I assume he does not have four separate computers to deal with four clients - so why does he have four phones? There is no reason one phone cannot get calls for four numbers, each with separate voice-mail or even with one voicemail box with separate greetings. I get a feeling the guy is such an ass to his IT guys, they are probably betting on how much torture they can put the poor idiot through ("I bet we can get him to carry three phone...." "NO, how about four Phones!!!")

As a mere IT peon, you probably don't understand how sales work, or how salespeople perform their jobs. It's not unusual to see talented salespeople talking to two or three separate people at once, while organizing particularly large or complex sales. They actually do need to use several separate phones while they work. Your idiotic "4 accounts 1 phone" idea fails completely.

Again, nothing that can't be handled easily with a single phone - ever hear of hold or conferencing? I think they had those back in the seventies... Perhaps you should make nice with your IT folks so that you can move into the current century.

Now, I totally appreciate a good sales person, I know a couple, but unfortunately they are such a tiny fraction of the sales force. Most of the sales are ignorant idiots with a god complex who think that four phones would make up for the fact that they are not actually paying attention to anyone around them including their clients (hint, it does not matter if you have a dedicated line for your client if you actually LISTEN to your client). And so what we deal with are sales people only think they are great, and have the need to actively put down everyone else so that they do not ruin their self-delusion. I mean, just because you close sales does not make you a good sales person - most companies who got my business, got it in spite of their sales staff -- not because of them. And thus the IT stuff makes them wear four phones and be happy with it and rest of the world makes fun of them.

In all fairness, there are plenty of idiots in IT too, so it could be that they don't know any better.

-Em

Bluetooth Audio?

[Meneguzzi]

I am reluctant to adopt this upgrade on day zero and the only thing that would make me do the upgrade is improved support for BT audio, which pretty much sucks in my iPod touch 2g. I also use the same BT headphones in my Android phone and it works brilliantly, so I wonder, has anybody done this upgrade and tested it with BT headphones like these ones? (http://www.sennheiserusa.com/private_headsets_mobile_bluetooth-wireless_music_502413)

Was the last time you checked in 2007?

[Brannon]

You've been able to develop and push your own custom enterprise apps without apple store restrictions for years.

There is a the ever so remote possibility...

[Brannon]

...that Apple actually knows what they are doing, considering that they literally cannot manufacture iDevices fast enough for people who are willing to buy them sight unseen.