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Open-Xchange’s E-Mail for the iPhone

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CIOs and CTOs have a problem. Their users want to use their iPhones and iPod Touch devices for business in the worse way and there’s no good way—yet—to get business Internet applications to an iPhone or the like. Well, until now.

Open-Xchange, an open-source e-mail company that usually works with service providers, has released a new Web interface on its Open-Xchange open-source project site.

Once installed on the server side, iPhone users get to use a native browser interface to access their e-mail and calendars with no configuration required need on the iPhone. Open-Xchange itself supports all the open e-mail and calendaring standards such as IMAP, POP3, LDAP, iCal, vCard, and WebDAV.

Open-Xchange will run on both SUSE and Red Hat Linux. There’s also a pre-packaged version which bundles Open-Xchange server with Ubuntu for SMBs (small-to-medium sized businesses) If you don’t want run your own e-mail servers, Open-Xchange services are also available from some Internet companies as Network Solutions.

In the future, Open-Xchange plans to work closer with Apple systems. The German company plans to soon announce integration tools for Apple Mac OS X iSync.

In a statement, Juergen Geck, Open-Xchange’s CTO said, “This gives users and developers on Mac OS X and iPhone access to an independent and freely available collaboration solution. The open-source version features a preview of the upcoming release of Open-Xchange Server including special capabilities for the iPhone.”

Now, if only the CTOs and CIOs had some way of managing iPhone and iPods in an enterprise, they might be happy with these business friendly developments for the Apple i-family.