Windows Phone 7 for Business v2 and more questions answered

My recent blog post on Windows Phone 7 for Business today and what’s coming soon generated lots of interest so with my recent focus on this topic and the demand for more information in this area, I thought I’d add more details and cover some of the questions that have come up in recent presentations.

First off, I’ve discovered a bunch more information that’s been published specifically for IT Pro’s looking to learn more about what Windows Phone 7 can do.  The Windows Phone 7 Guides for IT Professionals offers eight separate documents covering various aspects of security, management, and features in the Windows Phone 7 platform.  The most detailed of the bunch of course is the Windows Phone 7 and Exchange Server_Final_122010.pdf which has information very similar to the Exchange ActiveSync Considerations When Using Windows Phone 7 Clients link off the TechNet Wiki I pointed folks to at the end of my previous blog post.   The Exchange ActiveSync Client Comparison Table is also a must read to understand the various ActiveSync features available to the various ActiveSync enabled mobile devices in market.

Lots of the reader comments from my previous blog post mentioned things like “I can’t consider Windows Phone 7 for my business until it has XYZ feature…”   The Exchange ActiveSync Considerations When Using Windows Phone 7 Clients article touches on many of the missing enterprise features in Windows Phone 7 and some of the reasoning behind where they’re not there yet, namely the development process to date has been a what I’ll call a “consumer first” device.  I’ve added two slides to my Windows Phone 7 for Business Presentation that I previously posted and I’ve called out several of these missing features on slide 24.  You can download this updated presentation from here.

To give some context to this approach, I’ll quote The Exchange ActivSync Considerations When Using Windows Phone 7 Clients article: “It's important to note that Windows Phone 7 (WP7) primarily was developed as a consumer device and not an enterprise device. As a result there of many of the enterprise oriented features we had in Windows Mobile 6.x aren't available in WP7. However, now that WP7 is out, the Windows Phone 7 team can focus on improving WP7 further and they already do. In addition, since it's now possible to push out updates via the new "Phone Update" feature, it doesn't mean that you necessarily need to buy a new device or wait for the service provider to release a new build in order to benefit from features added after you got a WP7 device.”

As I believe I’ve pointed out in this post and my previous blog post, there are indeed a great number of business features contained in Windows Phone 7 that will meet the needs of many, many business customers.  If we don’t have the enterprise feature you need quite yet, keep in mind that Microsoft is indeed a company that understands the needs of the enterprise as well as anyone, so it’s only a matter of time before we add them to the Windows Phone platform.

Please keep the comments coming and keep checking back for more information on Windows Phone 7!