Question : Problem: Can my iPhone talk to my microsoft file server?

Hey, I work for a small company, not a big IT dept, a few of us have iphones and we're on our own if we want to interconnect our iphone to stuff.  (They finally enabled outlook/iphone, so that was good.)

I'm wondering if it's possible for iPhone to view/browse our Microsoft file servers.  Our IT guy said I should go find out if iPhone supports microsoft CIMS (for which wikipedia redirects me to SMB) for file sharing.  So far I haven't found many hits for SMB/CIMS and iPhone.  I imagine this would involve both figuring out the connectivity, and finding an app to provide the browser/viewer, unless somehow safari can be manipulated to do this.

I guess there are two situations, being able to do one or both would be great:

a) browse/view while in the building, connected to secure network (I can VNC to my work desktop, so it's definitely in the firewall)
b) browse/view while outside the building, using VPN

So this must be a common desire for iphone users, has anyone had any success with this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer : Problem: Can my iPhone talk to my microsoft file server?

Nope, Not John Gerhardt of arlington..>! I dont live in the states..

I havent heard anything about apple going for something built in natively for this sort of thing.. I as a windows user agree that this would be a nice feature.

Reasons why not..?

Well that is a intersting one.. Off the top of my head:

• The amount of data to be transferred over a ceulluar network would probably be to high to make it viable, would have to use it on a wifi network 
• To really make use of it then you would proably then need to be able to create documents proberly, then you would need a KB, mouse, bigger screen - and then its no longer a PDA but a full blown laptop.. 
• SMB is not a secured protocol and therefore you would have to run it over a VPN solution, also SMB is quite a bulky protocol + it is heavily based on windows NETBIOS (which is another reason to sterr clear of it..>!) 

http://samba.anu.edu.au/cifs/docs/what-is-smb.html