A lot of people don’t know it, but there is a way to deploy Enterprise Line of Business (LOB) applications to employee iPhones without using the Apple appstore.  It definitely has its caveats.  But, it’s worth knowing about.

If your company has 500 or more employees, you can buy an iPhone “Enterprise” developer license.  It’s a bit more then the “Standard” individual and company licenses, but not much.  For more on developer licenses, go here.

Once you have the license, you can sign your LOB apps with your certificate and provision them to company devices.  “Enterprise” developer licensing allows what is called “Universal” application provisioning.  This is the same type of provisioning that is granted to applications deployed through the Apple Appstore and allows deployment of the application to any iPhone on the face of the Earth.

Wow, so with a developer license, you can deploy an app to any iPhone out there without going through the appstore….WRONG!  The “Enterprise” developer license EULA that you accepted dicatates that you are only allowed to deploy apps to iPhones operated by employees of your company.  Deployment to any other iPhones is illegal.  And, I’m absolutely sure that Apple is not going to stand by and let you break the law.

Well, you can deploy your LOB app to your company users and that’s the important thing, right?  At this point, you may be wondering how you go about deploying the application to the employee-operated iPhone.  There are currently two ways to do it.  Use the iPhone Configuration Utility (iPCU) or use Apple iTunes.  Both methods are described in the Apple iPhone Enterprise Deployment Guide.

The caveat here is that neither iPCU or iTunes app deployment can be performed directly between the iPhone and a server.  Both iPCU and iTunes are desktop applications that run on either a Mac or Windows machine.  But, they do support two different scenarios.  iPCU is best if you want to setup a bulk number of iPhones with your LOB before giving them to the user.  iTunes is better for deployment of the app or on-going updates when the iPhone is already in the user’s hands.

When deploying the LOB app, you have to get your Enterprise Developer License .mobileprovision file installed on the iPhone before you can install a .app file.  You can deploy the .mobileprovision file using desktop management that you may have deployed in your network to offload this task from the user.  When the iPhone is connected to the desktop running iTunes, the .mobileprovision file will be deployed.  Then the user must add the .app to their app library and select to install it on their iPhone.

I just came across an interesting marketing gimmick – www.bargaincell.com have extended some of their deals till January 15th 2010 !

However there is a catch – you have to place the orders on Thursdays and Fridays only in addition to using the THRFRIDAY coupon.

So in order to get the 15% off:

1) Go to www.bargaincell.com Thu or Fri ONLY

2) During checkout use THRFRIDAY coupon

3) Save 15% on your new Motorola Droid or iPhone or even Windows Mobile Accessories

Every time we have a larger gathering of people, being it at my house for a party, at a lake for some water skiing fun or at the mountains for hiking and back country skiing there is a guarantee that in the 10 or so phones there is going to be at last couple of iPhones. What can I say, all of my friends are super cool and ride the technology fashion wave.

During the process of trying to help businesses to adopt iPhones as tools I run into couple obstacles. Some are small like the calendaring functionality and some were bigger.

However today, one of the large obstacles for using iPhone primary device was removed – TomTom has announced availability of their turn by turn navigation in the Apple App Store. It features some interesting technologies such as the one called IQ Routes, said the company. Instead of suggesting the quickest route based on travel time, IQ Routes taps into the actual experiences of other TomTom drivers to determine the fastest route to take. TomTom said this technology lets people reach their destinations quicker up to 35 percent of the time.

I prefer TomTom, mainly because on Windows Mobile, where I have been using it for years now, it allows you to select driving, walking biking and other types of transport, it uses my phone thus I don’t have to pay the extra 9.95 when renting a car for a dedicated GPS unit, has a great database for points of interest and I really like their performance and functionality. But they are not alone in providing turn by turn navigation for iPhone here are couple other solutions:

TomTom for iPhone – 99$ for US and Canada maps – more details here

Navigon – 69$ for US and Canada maps Comparison with iGo My Way is here

iGo My Way – 79$ for US and Canada maps Comparison with Navigon is here

Now only time will show if my friends will stop buying and using the sometimes bulky and overpriced standalone GPS units for their cars or paying for the software update in their car. One of them shared that to update the built-in navigation in a Japanese high end sedan it close to 700 US$! But I know that anybody who has an iPhone now has a good, reliable and well working alternative for turn by turn navigation How about you? Will you use iPhone instead of other GPS devices? Please share your opinion in the comments below.

Cancelled Sendo WM device

I have started to work with smartphones sometime in 1998. I even have a mint prototype of what supposed to be the first Windows Mobile powered phone by Sendo – project that got canceled in 2002. Read more about it here.

Anyway fast forward to 2006 and any IT executive that was thinking about deploying mobile email / PIM and mobile applications basically had two basic option RIM/Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Each had its advantages and issues but once you had your requirements and made your decision, there was a good chance for you to run homogeneous platform. IT Helpdesk and Support, Training, Security and other departments became aware of the platform of choice and while international presence may posed a challenge with availability and the Symbian disruption (especially in Europe) the job was quite easy.

But something did happen in 2007 – the Apple released iPhone and stirred the pot. While the first generation was not suited at serious business use, the second one in 2008 added support for Microsoft Exchange and history started to repeat itself. IT managers were asked by their executives to figure out how to support iPhone, instead of their Blackberries. Regular employees started to bring their own devices and peer support helped them to get corporate email enabled. And the numbers grew.

Today with the introduction of Palm Pre into the mix, the bigger use of ruggedized devices that almost exclusively run Windows Mobile OS, over 30 new smatphone devices running Android planned for release before the end of the year and iPhone being on its 3^rd generation, the 2006 homogenous era looks like a something that will never happen again.

The reality is that most if not all IT departments and business owners have to consider supporting multiple platforms and consider the impacts and risks of all of them. There are some tools that serve multiple platforms well but most are just in their infancy. Also how to make a decision on which support and which just allow /enable but don’t provide any support?

Enterprise Mobile has been building mobile expertise since 2006. If you have any questions about what to do why don’t you send quick email or attend one of the great webinars