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Bunker Hollow

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Personal discoveries of an IT professional.

Connect an iPhone to Exchange 2007 via ActiveSync

My girlfriend bought an iPhone yesterday and I'm jealous, straight up.  Her number was transfered and the phone was fully functional by dinner so we took it with us to BDubs.  We played with it during dinner; we surfed the web, watched some YouTube videos, and tooled with the settings.  I wish I could get one myself right now, but I can't, so I'll settle for hooking it up to my Exchange server.  Something I've been wanting to do for a long time now.

After she went to bed, it was time for me to get to work.  I figured I was in for a bit of mailbox, profile, or policy tweaking in Exchange.  I checked the settings under Client Access and ActiveSync was already enabled.  Good.  Next would be the ports, what kind of traffic do I need to let through the firewall.  I did some searches but I didn't come up with any substantial.  I finally came across an article saying if you have Outlook Web Access up and running with an SSL certificate, you should be good to go.  Well, ok, I'll just give it a shot.

I create a new mail account on the phone, choose Exchange, enter the account and server information ... and I'm in!  Except, for the warning that continuing will clear your current calendar and contacts:

Continuing will erase all of your contacts.  Are you sure you want to continue?

[FLASHBACK TO DINNER]
"Hey babe, before entering all your contacts, maybe you should wait until I hook it up to BunkerHollow.  You know, just in case."
"OK first of all, this is my new phone.  It's not your project.  I'll do whatever I want with it.  Maybe you shouldn't even touch it, I don't want you to break it!"
[END FLASHBACK]

Yes.  I'll continue.

This will REALLY delete ALL of your contacts.  Are you ABSOLUTELY sure you want to continune?

... sigh ... Yes.

And then I stayed up until 2am re-entering all of her contacts.  I remoted into her desktop machine, launched Outlook, and entered the information there which was a little more bearable.  Then I just opened her contacts on her iPhone and there they were.  I'm impressed, I can't wait to get one.

Comments

 

Ahmed Abdou said:

Am suprised you got away with it ... lol ... but kudos.

I am planning to replace my BES infrastructure with iphone for all the users in my company and i was wondering if you have any pointers or warnings before i go ahead with it ...

please reply to

a h m e d DOT a b d o u AT g m a i l DOT c o m

if possible, if not then i'll be visiting here later on to check on your reply.

Thanks

December 18, 2008 3:14 PM
 

Matt Williamson said:

Your users are lucky, I wish my company would do the same!

If you already have Exchange 2007 running with OWA access enabled, you're all set.  I also have POP3 and IMAP access enabled, but they're not required for ActiveSync.

One thing I didn't expect was that the ActiveSync traffic comes in on the HTTPS protocol.  I figured it'd be some new mail port (the way POP3 and IMAP have their own ports) and I'd have to make some new firewall rules.  I was pleasantly surprised when I didn't have to modify my firewall settings at all.  If you have Exchange OWA configured properly with an SSL certificate, you're good to go.

As with the "Contacts" problem I had in my post, be aware the iPhone will only use Exchange messages, contacts, and calendars once connected ... so you will lose anything local once you hook it up.  You'll be warned during the setup process about this and it shouldn't be a problem if you're building them new.

I can't give you many details on performance.  I only have 1 iPhone, POP3 access from my BlackBerry, and a handful of OWA users.  My Exchange Server and Edge Transport Servers are both virtual machines, and performance has been fantastic since it's never under much load.  I'm curious to how many users you'll have configured and what your infrastructure is like.

Hope this helps, good luck!

December 18, 2008 4:28 PM
 

Sal J. Rampelli said:

We only only one Iphone but it will only recv and NOPT send. I am using exchange 2007 and owa. ALL of the owa users are OK and the blackberry phones but NOT IPhone. I tried setting up the exchange option but not luck. Same problem can not validate password.

March 19, 2009 11:05 PM
 

Matt Williamson said:

ActiveSync uses a single secure port (https) for all communication, so if you can receive mail then your connection is fine and you should be able to send mail and use your calendar & contacts.  If sending mail is the only part that fails, then I would check your Exchange configuration starting with your Send Connectors.

March 20, 2009 8:46 AM
 

davmac said:

could you email me with the instructions of how to set this up as i have o do it for my managers at work. my email is maccormac@hotmail.co.uk

May 20, 2009 3:50 AM

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