With BlackBerry seemingly on the ropes at the the moment, Microsoft clearly sees an opening to go after more business and enterprise users who might dump BlackBerry for other smartphones. Today, as part of the Nokia World press event, Microsoft announced plans to beef up its enterprise features for Windows Phone in 2014.
As reported by WMPoweruser, Microsoft’s Erwin Visser announced during the event that the Enterprise Feature Pack for Windows Phone will be released sometime in the first half of 2014. It will include some long requested additions to the OS such as VPN support, S/MIME encrypted email, a certificate manager, a way to allow or deny certain apps to be installed on enterprise-based phones and more.
In addition, two popular business themed apps, GoToMeeting and Cisco WebEx, are also coming to the Windows Phone Store but no release dates were announced. Finally, Microsoft will extend support for Windows Phone from 18 months to 36 months for business use.
All of these developments are encouraging and it shows that Microsoft wants Windows Phone to be used by business customers as much as Windows is used by those same companies for their PC hardware and software development.
Source: WMPoweruser | Image via WMPoweruser