I was recently assigned a task to pull a list of users who use mobile devices for company email. I came across a neat website with several PowerShell commands listed to help generate the list.
There is a command to generate a device count of each type of device used. There is also a command to generate six different .CSV files that can be used to see a list of users, emails received, type of device, device id, etc.
A customer reported a problem with one of their users not being able to get email on his iPhone. His phone would setup his account successfully, but when he went to the mail app, it would say “The connection to the mail server failed.” The customer tried setting up another user’s mailbox on his phone and it work correctly. I setup both accounts on my iPhone and saw the same results. I checked his account in Exchange to make sure ActiveSync was enabled. After some research, I found that the user’s Active Directory account must inherit permissions from the parent folder for email to sync.
To change this setting, first open Active Directory.
Enable Advanced Features – (View > Advanced Features).
Find the user’s account in Active Directory and open the Properties.
Go the Security tab > Advanced > Check “Include inheritable permissions from this object’s parent”. [more]
Click Apply and close Active Directory.
Refresh the mail app on the phone and mail should start flowing.
I was forced to change my network password the other morning. No big deal. However, around lunch I noticed my iPhone battery life was down to 17% (from 100% at 8:00am). I had forgotten to update my ActiveSync password on my iPhone after the change (which seemed to cause the phone to continually fail to sync my e-mail and killed my battery). In the future, I’ll need to remember to change both passwords at the same time.
Troubleshooting ActiveSync without access to a users smart phone is difficult. Using an device emulator is possible but time consuming. I recently ran across a nice site from Microsoft which is useful in checking several different items associated with Exchange remote connectivity.
https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com [more]
Normally, if you want to install Office Communicator Mobile on your phone you have to do so by running an MSI on you PC, then sync your phone to install the application through ActiveSync. If you prefer to just install directly from the .cab file, you can browse to www.getcomo.com (this is a Microsoft website) on your mobile phone, choose your phones OS, then install the .cab directly from the website, no PC or syncing involved!
The iPhone currently supports the following security policies from Exchange (note: you must have Exchange Server 2003 SP2 or Exchange Server 2007 SP1 or greater):
When you perform the remote wipe from Exchange, it restores your iPhone to factory default (note: this could take up to an hour). The gotcha – after you perform remote wipe, be sure to “remove mobile device partnership” with your iPhone; otherwise, the next time you try to sync with Exchange it will wipe (restore to factory default) again . . .