iPhone for Business, Features OSX-Level VPN and Quick Look for Word and Excel Files

Our iPhone sources have dropped a few more tantalizing bits on us about the upcoming iPhone. This continues the recent coverage of the YouTube button and the VERY interesting new features. There is so much information coming to the surface about the iPhone and its consumer capabilities but we did find some business focussed capabilities in the little guy.

VPN:
The iPhones will have the standard OSX VPN client when they ship next week.  This will allow connecting to Macintosh and Windows VPN Servers on L2TP or PPTP over IPSEC.  The client is very simple and will be set up from its own settings pane.  Cisco PIX VPN connectivity is a little blurry as some configurations work with the default OSX client as it does in the Macintosh client, others do not.  Cisco is rumored to be working on a VPN Client for the iPhone as well as Soft Phone integration into its latest Call Manager Server but that is a long way off, if at all.

There are also reports of email functionality of IMAP over SSL - adding to the business case for iPhone (Contrary to the Microsoft-funded  Gartner, 451, and IDC statements)

Word Docs and Excel Sheets
The iPhone utilizes Leopard's Quick Look functionality to view Microsoft Word and Excel Files.  Once viewing the files, you cannot edit them, however, unless you use Google Docs and Spreadsheets through the Safari Browser.  According to Apple's website, Quick Look works with nearly every file on your system, including
images, text files, PDFs, movies, Keynote presentations, and Microsoft
Word and Excel files.  It will be a welcome addition to iPhone.