12 essential Microsoft business apps for the iPhone

Summary: As part of Microsoft’s “mobile first, cloud first” mission, it has built up a large portfolio of consumer and business apps on every platform. In this roundup, I look at a dozen iOS apps that help business users and IT pros stay productive with an iPhone and Microsoft services.

A dozen Microsoft apps built for the iPhone

The iPhone 6 and especially the iPhone 6 Plus work extremely well with Microsoft services, especially Office 365.

As far as I’m concerned, Apple’s previous flagship phone, the 5S, was just too small to consider using with productivity apps. But the larger screens on the latest Apple phones have enough screen real estate to be genuinely useful.

In this gallery, I’ve brought together a dozen business-focused apps available for iPhones (iOS) and iPad. My list includes a wide range of categories, with all apps available for free on the iTunes App Store.

The traditional Office apps are well represented, in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote. You can do basic editing without a paid Office subscription, although the combination of these apps with an Office 365 subscription unlocks much more.

On the email side, I’ve included Acompli, which is the newest Microsoft app thanks to the company’s purchase of the startup, announced just days ago.

Office 365 subscriptions work best with Microsoft’s OneDrive storage. You can install separate apps for the consumer OneDrive service and OneDrive for Business. Microsoft plans to bring the two services more in sync, so it’s possible that by this time next year there will be only a single app able to connect to either or both services. Word of caution, at the time of this post, One drive for business app is not available on Macs.

Lync 2013 is available for iPhones and works especially well for video chats on the larger iPhone screens.

And finally, there are administrative tools designed primarily for IT pros, including a suprisingly good Remote Desktop client.