But the rise of PDAs, WAP phones, and organizers with e-mail functions that employees use more and more to conduct business has steadily eroded the reasons for denying support. Supporting the wide range of mobile devices available today can seem like an insurmountable challenge. Although these tools vary greatly in capabilities, that diversity gives you a distinct advantage when determining the level of support you're going to provide. For simple pocket organizers, such as those offered by Casio and Cybiko, offering replacement batteries may suffice. Complex devices such as Palms and PocketPCs, on the other hand, can quickly become a support and security nightmare.
Phones fall somewhere in the middle.
You don't want to spend any time supporting basic dial-tone use unless you're allowing these devices to access the corporate network, in which case you're going to be providing support for that use. Fortunately, you would be making most of these same support decisions if your company itself were paying for the gadgets. Many factors will affect your support decisions, but the most important are those of security. Traditional security policies have assumed that machines are wired to the network, and few companies have updated their policies to recognize the security problems created by laptops, much less wireless technologies. Lost and stolen devices are at the top of the list of these problems, but as the case of former CIA Director John Deutch and his allegedly improper use of classified data on his home systems indicates, they are far from being the only problems IT departments face.