iPhone Configuration Utility 2.0

In the hands of an IT administrator, Apple’s iPhone Configuration Utility becomes an important security tool for iPhones on his network. The new 2.0 release sports some welcome improvements, though it could use better documentation and still falls flat in some areas.

With the 3.0 release of the iPhone’s OS, Apple added quite a few welcome features to help make the iPhone more useful in a business environment. The iPhone Configuration Utility (ICU) was released shortly thereafter. For the uninitiated, the ICU helps system administrators to create, maintain, encrypt and push configuration profiles—XML files on the iPhone which contain information crucial to the device’s secure communication on a corporate intranet.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time working with the ICU since version 2 was released, and it has mostly been a good experience. (Note: Since we don’t do any in-house applications, or preload applications, I’ve not used the Applications or Provisioning Profiles features of ICU 2.)

There’s no work to upgrade configurations from the first version of the ICU. They just worked, and required zero extra work to continue using unchanged, a big benefit to adminstrators transitioning to the new software.

Within the Configuration Profiles setup, the UI has gotten a tweak to make using the new features easier. Instead of a series of tabs across the top of a pane, the individual features are now set up vertically, with rather nice icons. While a minor change, I’ve found the new layout to be much nicer to work with.

Full Details: MacWorld