Apple's iPhone drew criticism when first released because of tepid enterprise business support. Small businesses felt the pain of iPhone envy more sharply than their enterprise counterparts because of the high up-front cost of the first iPhone and the back-end support requirements for high-end e-mail and communication servers.

But the second generation of iPhones, the new 3G version, answers almost all these issues. Costs are down to below what many people pay for other smart phones. Integration to existing e-mail servers is faster and easier. Yet those back-end servers still require heavy investment up front and technical support later, especially when loading up a new Microsoft Exchange 2007 server.

[ Read Tom Yager's review of the iPhone 3G and its over-the-air capabilities | See InfoWorld's guide on how to make the new iPhone work in your business | Analysis: Why iPhone 2.0 won't rule the enterprise roost  ]

Let's talk about two options for the small business iPhone users who are eager to get full smart phone and mobile computing advantages from their new shiny faced toy, er, iPhone. Neither option includes Microsoft Exchange, saving money and time while supporting the miracle of communication (at least according to Apple).

Jeffrey Bernstein is the president of Digital Desktop Consulting in Los Angeles, a firm with ties to the entertainment business. As such, Bernstein is a long-time Macintosh user and advocate, and supports many customer offices filled with Macintosh systems. Bringing iPhone support to his clients was not an option but a demand.

"We're hands-on and act like an outsourced IT department for our customers," Bernstein says. "Many are the unsung heroes in media, like graphics designers or flash programmers whose work you see on every TV show and many Web sites." Most companies he supports employ 10 to 60 people, and Digital Desktop Consulting provides services ranging from occasional visits for new installations to complete support of all office and production computing.

How does Bernstein support iPhones for his customers? By using MailServer from Kerio Technologies. MailServer provides all the messaging features of Exchange for less money and requires fewer add-ons for security and messaging support. In addition, MailServer software runs on Windows, Linux, or Apple servers. Bernstein has installed 30 or so systems and provides constant remote management for about 10 of them.

"Many of our customers are moving to the iPhone from Palms and BlackBerries," Bernstein says. "BlackBerry support requires the Blackberry Exchange Server, and iPhones avoid that extra cost. Plus, most of my customers use Macs, so they're more comfortable with the look of the iPhone."

Kerio's MailServer includes over the air synchronization, push e-mail, push tasks, and push calendaring. Another nice feature is "remote wipe" that allows a network administrator to delete all information from a lost iPhone. "Three of my customers lost their phones last week," Bernstein says.

Bernstein was the first Mac reseller to sign up with Kerio. Early on, he called them regularly pushing for changes and new features, but hasn't made those calls for the last two years. "My customers appreciate the stability, ease of use, and support for multiple platforms. Kerio actually has feature parity, which a lot of others don't."

Another option for iPhone support is a hosted mail provider. There are scores of companies that provide Microsoft Exchange support, now including Microsoft (and it is promising to add more hosted options in the future). Well, scores understates the number of options a bit. Searching on "iphone exchange hosting service" turned up 346,000 listings.

With those numbers, picking an Exchange host to pay along with the higher AT&T rates on the iPhone 3G becomes an almost overwhelming choice. I suggest you leverage as many features as possible of your new iPhone, and get as many other advantages as you can.

A hosted collaboration service I've talked about before, HyperOffice, added iPhone support to its Exchange hosting service, but it added an extra twist. Since the iPhone can run applications, HyperOffice supports shared document storage and collaboration. If you can stand the iPhone keyboard, you can work on shared documents from the same source as your e-mail hosting.

The iPhone's browser support over 3G turns the Apple version of a smart phone into a real work phone with support from services like HyperOffice. Quite a switch from all the anti-business complaints Apple heard for the initial iPhone release, isn't it?

People ask me if I'm using an iPhone. Nope. Apple hasn't given me one, and I didn't expect them to. But I'm not even considering an iPhone until the QWERTY keyboard runs in landscape mode so I can use two thumbs. Now it runs in portrait mode forcing me to use one finger. Way too slow, and not at all cool.

A recently discovered security flaw that would allow access to a locked iPhone will be fixed next month, Apple said on Thursday.

"The minor iPhone security issue which surfaced this week is fixed in a software update which will be released in September," Apple representative, Jennifer Bowcock, said in an email to Macworld.

[ Special reports: IT's guide to the iPhone |  Apple launches the iPhone 3G ]

The security flaw allows access to a locked iPhone by pressing the emergency call button at the unlock screen, followed by two taps on the home button. That will take you to the iPhone's private 'favorites' page without the need to enter the unlock code. If the owner of the phone has favorite entries in their address book containing URLs, e-mail addresses, or mobile phone numbers, then those entries can be used to launch the browser, mail application or SMS software and gain access to private Web favorites, e-mail messages and text messages stored in the phone, again without entering the unlock code.

Bowcock offered some advice to protect your phone until the software update is released. She said you can set the iPhone so that double-clicking the home button will take the user directly to the home screen, which if password protection is turned on, will be the unlock screen.

Fixing performance issues that have plagued previous versions of its Windows client OS and Internet Explorer (IE) browser are key development goals for the next versions of those products, Microsoft has revealed in company blogs.

IE 7 and Windows Vista have had serious performance problems early on that have alienated users and damaged the reputations of the products. Some IE users switched to Mozilla Firefox because of IE 7's frequent crashes and performance glitches, while Vista's bugs, incompatibility problems and other issues have been well-documented.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

Microsoft is paying close attention to performance in Windows 7 and IE 8 as it develops both products, the company revealed in separate internal blogs about each product, "Engineering Windows 7" and "IEblog."

"We've re-dedicated ourselves to work in this area (performance) in Windows 7 (and IE 8)," according to the Engineering Windows 7 post. "This is a major initiative across each of our feature teams as well as the primary mission of one of our feature teams."

The company has an uphill battle to improving performance, particularly with Windows 7, said one analyst.

"I'm not surprised they're going to focus on performance," said Mike Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "I'm somewhat skeptical how much improvement they're going to make at this point."

He suggested Microsoft consider performance for Windows 7 the way it approached security when the company decided to make that a key priority for Vista. When Microsoft decided security was integral to the OS, the company engineered Vista so "every feature has a security attribute to it," Cherry said.

Similarly, the company should make performance such a priority that "anyone checking any code into Windows 7 not only has to make sure it's the most secure code and the most reliable code, but they'd better be addressing the performance of the code as well," he said.

While performance is made up of "many elements," the Windows 7 team is focusing on six areas of improvement in Windows 7, according to the post. They are memory usage, CPU utilization, disk I/O, the boot-shutdown-standby-resume feature, the base system, and disk footprint.

CPU utilization in particular is a problem in Vista, and could use improvement in Windows 7. Cherry said he runs a 32-bit version of Vista on a PC with a 64-bit processor and 2GB of RAM. However, when he starts his Outlook e-mail client, it uses 100 percent of his CPU resources for more than a minute and a half. "It blows me away," he said of the problem.

Indeed, Microsoft said a key engineering goal for Windows 7 is to "keep the CPU utilization low as that improves multi-user scenarios as well as reduces power consumption," according to the Windows 7 blog post.

The focus of IE 8 improvements, according to the IEblog post, will be how to make pages and images load faster for "everyday" browsing. This will require improvements to scripting, the rendering engine and networking improvements, among others, the company said.

Microsoft has said it expects to release Windows 7 in early 2010; however, the company has not provided a time frame for the final release of IE8, though it is safe to say it likely will be a part of the Windows 7 release. Microsoft released IE8 beta 2 on Wednesday.

Google unveiled on Thursday its plans for a store where mobile users can find Android applications, a concept similar to the iPhone's App Store.

The first handsets running Android, expected to appear later this year, will include a beta version of the Android Market, Google's Eric Chu wrote in a blog post. Initially, users will at least be able to find free applications there. After that, Google expects to update the Market to allow users to buy and download paid content.

[ Special report: Google Android: Invader from beyond ]

The Market will feature a feedback and rating system similar to that used in YouTube, Chu said.

Developers can add their applications to the market by registering as a merchant, uploading the content, and publishing it. Google expects to add features for developers after the initial launch, including a dashboard where developers can find analytics information about their content. Developers will also be able to upload different versions of their applications that might work better on different devices.

Android followers have wondered how Google might support application distribution. Its Android Market is a similar concept to Apple's App Store, but differs in some ways. For instance, because all iPhones run on the same software, developers don't have to create different versions for different phones. Android is open, and handset makers may decide to include different hardware capabilities or opt not to support all Android features, which has an effect on the way applications work.

Historically, the mobile market has struggled with how to best sell and distribute mobile applications. Prior to the iPhone, the best way for an application to become widely used was for a developer to convince an operator to pre-load it onto a phone, a challenging accomplishment. Mobile phone users only very seldom download applications to their phones.

Due to the three outages that Gmail suffered earlier this month, Google will extend a credit to all paying customers of its hosted Apps suite and has vowed to improve its problem-notification methods.

In an apologetic e-mail sent Wednesday to Apps Premier administrators, Google said it will automatically extend annual subscriptions by 15 days at no extra charge. Apps Premier subscriptions cost $50 per user per year. This 15-day extension is the maximum credit of the 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement Google offers Premier customers for Gmail.

"We're committed to making Google Apps Premier Edition a service on which your organization can depend. During the first half of August, we didn't do this as well as we should have," reads the letter.

One outage, on Aug. 11, lasted about two hours but affected almost all Apps Premier users. The other two, on Aug. 6 and Aug. 15, hit a small number of Apps Premier users, but both outages were lengthy, lasting for some affected users more than 24 hours. In all of the incidents, users were unable to access their Gmail accounts, getting instead an error message when trying to log in.

In Wednesday's letter, Google said that system reliability is a top priority and that, although it can't promise zero downtime, it commits to solving outages quickly. "More importantly, we promise you focused discipline on preventing recurrence of the same problem," the letter reads.

In addition, Google plans to improve the way it informs Apps Premier administrators about system problems via a new dashboard that will become available in a few months.

That dashboard will provide descriptions of problems, especially of their impact on users; a regularly updated estimate of when the issues will be resolved; and, if necessary, a formal report within 48 hours of the resolution. The report will describe the incident, explain its cause, list corrective and preventive actions taken, and provide an outage timeline.

Google officials will also make themselves available to participate in live discussions about the incident with Apps Premier administrators and their companies' managers.

The plans for fuller disclosure of problem causes, fixes and prevention plans sound good to Gartner analyst Matt Cain, but he's confused as to why Google didn't start applying these principles with this letter, which he found slim on details.

"I'd like more transparency into what actually happened and why. They don't go into that [in this letter]. That's what they should have done in this note," Cain said. "Why start in the future and not now?"

Crediting all Apps Premier customers across the board and taking proactive steps to prevent future outages were the right actions for Google to take, said analyst Rebecca Wettemann from Nucleus Research.

"These are natural growing pains for an on-demand vendor," she said. "Google is doing what it needed to do [to respond to the outages], but in fairness to Google, it's held to a higher standard in terms of uptime and availability, as are many on-demand vendors, when you compare them to internally deployed applications."

Apps comes in various versions, including the free Basic and Education editions and the fee-based Premier edition. In addition to Gmail, it includes Google hosted services like Calendar, Sites, Talk, and the Docs word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software.

Overall, more than 500,000 businesses with 10 million active users use Apps. Hundreds of thousands of those active users have Premier subscriptions, according to Google.

With Apps, a hosted suite of communications and collaboration applications, Google is a leading proponent of SaaS, an emerging model of software delivery that backers say represents the future.

Because vendors host applications in their own data centers, companies don't have to concern themselves with hardware provisioning and software maintenance. By living in the Internet "cloud," these hosted applications simplify sharing and collaboration among employees.

However, outages such as the one Gmail experienced are among the biggest question marks regarding SaaS applications, as IT and business managers ponder whether to ditch conventional software packages that are installed on their companies' servers.

 When applications hosted by vendors go down, there is little that IT and business managers can do to remedy the situation and respond to their angry end-users.

Google Apps critics question whether the suite can really provide enterprise-grade software availability and performance and thus be a real option in large companies to conventional, on-premise options like Microsoft's Office and Outlook/Exchange or IBM Lotus Notes/Domino.

Google acknowledges that most Apps subscribers are individuals or small and medium-size organizations. However, the company has high hopes that the Premier edition, with its IT management and enterprise software integration features, will push into the enterprise market of large companies.

Google has proved it can learn from mistakes and has improved as an enterprise IT provider, Cain said. However, Gartner's advice to enterprises is to hold off on adopting Gmail as an e-mail system, and this month's outages justify that position, Cain said.

"A 24-hour outage of e-mail for many companies would be catastrophic. That indicates that our cautious approach is warranted," he said.

Before giving the green light to its customers, Gartner wants to see at least a dozen enterprise deployments of Apps Premier with at least 10,000 Gmail seats, each running successfully for six to 12 months, Cain said.

This story was updated on August 28, 2008

Aptana, which has enabled Web 2.0 development via JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and PHP with the Aptana Studio IDE, has added Python to the mix through its acquisition of Pydev, which was announced this week.

The company plans to combine the Pydev Eclipse-based development environment with Aptana Studio, which has supported AJAX and has been downloaded nearly 2.3 million times, Aptana said. Developers now can use Aptana Studio and Pydev side by side or plug them into Eclipse. Both are open source with commercially available extensions.

"Python kind of completes the portfolio of popular scripting languages that people use to build Web apps," said Kevin Hakman, Aptana director of evangelism.

Aptana currently has no timeframe for full integration between Aptana Studio and Pydev. The company also would not reveal how much it paid for Pydev.

With Pydev, developers get capabilities for code completion and analysis, a debug console and server, and refactoring. Aptana Studio, meanwhile, supports Web development by integrating AJAX tooling with PHP and Ruby on Rails. Ruby development is supported as well.

Aptana stressed the popularity of Python, particularly Google's selection of the language for use with its Google App Engine hosted application service. "When Google gets behind something, there tends to be a lot of attention [paid] to it. We've seen an increased utilization of the Python language," Hakman said.

Through the Pydev IDE, developers can deploy and manage applications to a computing cloud via linkup with the Aptana Cloud product for cloud-based deployments.