If Apple’s newest job listing is any indicator, the techies at Cupertino are looking to bring on a new employee to finally bring Microsoft Exchange functionality to the iPhone. Apple is apparently looking for a “motivated, highly-technical Exchange test/sync engineer with excellent problem solving and communication skills,” who will be joining “a dynamic team responsible for qualifying the latest iPhone products…Your focus will be testing Exchange and Outlook functionality with Apple’s innovative new phone.”
Apple has been pushing to break into the enterprise environment with the iPhone, but the lack of support for the Microsoft Exchange email system that hive-minded corporations love so much has kept the iPhone largely a favorite of the consumer crowd. With support for the email syncing capabilities of MS Exchange, however, Apple could successfully make the iPhone a business contender that may give the BlackBerry a serious run for its money. As it stands today, the iPhone is only capable of limited MS Exchange support through third-party offerings and supports IMAP email synchronization in certain situations.
A recent survey found that 98% of respondents would be much more likely to pick up an iPhone if it had support for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft ActiveSync. While ActiveSync is pretty much the arch-rival of Apple’s iTunes-based sync strategy, it might make prudent business sense for Apple to give in and finally support it. After all, Apple’s support for MS software applications like the MS Office suite and even virtualization of Windows has brought Apple to the competitive foreground in recent years.
If Apple does rollout support for Microsoft Exchange email synchronization, you can bet that we’ll be setting up our own MS Exchange servers.
[Via: Apple Insider]