As a wider variety of smartphones, most notably the iPhone, continues to invade the workplace, IT can no longer simply say no and turn away from these BlackBerry alternatives. It's time to face smartphones head on and decide which ones can be implemented in your organization.

Try as you may to maintain the great corporate barrier against employees using the latest smartphones on your network, the iPhone has or will soon enter your business and connect to your IT systems, and Google's Android devices such as the Droid series are not far behind.

So says InfoWorld, which presents a massive smartphone analysis that's a must read. The report identifies four categories of companies based mainly on the kinds of security they need and then matches today's leading smartphones to those categories, making the case that in many instances a wide selection of smartphones can find happy homes in an organization no matter how stringent its security rules are. As it turns out, the iPhone is surprisingly well suited to three of the four types of companies InfoWorld defines. On the other hand, security gaps in the Android OS makes Android-based phones less suitable overall. The conclusion: "Now the question is not whether your business should say yes to smartphones but what value it seeks from their broad use. That's a better question to ask and an even better one to help the business answer." Start studying. --Don Willmott