iPhone for Intranet

Question

It started one day while I was using my iPod Touch: wouldn't it be cool to have XXX function (from our internal desktop application) available on the iPhone as an native app.

I had that idea because (A) I think our current bulky desktop internal 6+ years old application suite needs a major face lift, and (B) instead of continuing our waterfall development methodology, which usually resulted in a project canned after tens of people spending months on something that no user cares about. I hope that we can start doing lots of tiny projects with 2 week iteration cycles using Agile methodology.

Oh, I also want to find an excuse to use XCode in the office.

After researching, I found out that pretty much NO COMPANY does iPhone native intranet applications because no company wants their internal development needs to be controlled by Apple who tends to kill cool apps like Google Talk. Since our company is ultra concerned about security and safety, the phrase "using a jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch" is the same as saying "please fire me".

So I came up with plan B: using ComponentOne iPhone Studio to do a iPhone optimized intranet web application. I spent 2+ weeks and it is about finished. My supervisor seemed very excited about it, so hopefully we can turn it into a long term project.

My question is: have any of you tried writing an iPhone application (either native app or web based app) for your company's internal use, and what are the technical and political challenges?

Answer 1

We've talked about it some at my office, but that's as far as it's gone. The Enterprise developer license allows you to control the distribution of your app within your organization, not Apple. The AppStore isn't involved at all.

Answer 2

If you write your web applications well it is very easy to add an interface for most mobile devices not just iphone.

We use things like: intranet.domain.com/application/mobile/

We always create our web apps with layers of functionality so that the UI side is easily switchable. My favorite at the moment is MVC style. This way you just have a UI designer work on the mobile interface but all the underlying business logic is the same which ever device you are using.

I would also still love to write native iPhone apps for our systems as they are just much cooler :-) Damn you Apple for not allowing us.

Answer 3

I've written three internal applications (native) for my company.

We are able to use ad-hoc distribution (less than 100 users ; do not qualify for the 500 person enterprise program).

It's been great. The execs love it, our salespeople are using them like crazy. A few new customers have already been credited to being impressed by our tech and coming on board when they saw our apps.

Win-win-win so far.

Answer 4

I build all of my iPhone app as we apps using ASP.NET. ComponentOne has Studio for iPhone which lets you build ASP.NET sites that look and behave like native iPhone apps. It's a great solution for Microsoft developers like me who do not have access to Apple machine or Dev Kits.

I used it to build a mobile version of our website that calls the same class library our main website does. This is my favorite part of the concept, using my existing model.

Here is the link where you can read more about the iPhone ASP.NET controls