You know, it probably started the day that someone wanted to bring his favorite abacus to work. Since then, people have wanted to bring their own tools--right up to the Blackberries and Treos [1] of today--into the enterprise. When they do, it inevitably leads to headaches for IT. After all, the information technology pros want manageability, standards conformance, and support-line ease. Users, on the other hand, want a single device that takes care of all the business and personal tasks they have to deal with on a daily basis. The latest  personal tool to make the IT department's life more difficult is Apple's iPhone [2], which is causing problems ranging from application incompatibility to jealous rage among fellow employees. Creating a set of policies that everyone can live with is harder than it sounds--but much easier than running a business with no personal device policies at all.

For more on the difficulties of personal devices in corporate IT:
- Read the practical advice [3] at eWeek