Here’s an interesting one that we’ll be watching closely. Apparently the OS4 software update for iPhones recently released by Apple is causing problems with some Exchange servers. I’m guessing that the more iPhones you have hooking into your Exchange server the more likely this problem is to occur. Apple has released a quick and easy patch for the problem, but the patch must be installed on each iPhone individually. See the link for more details.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3398

Of all of the mobile devices I’ve ever had to support, the iPhone is so far proving to be the easiest. I wouldn’t want to support a large fleet of them, as I’m not sure their enterprise manageability is a scratch on Blackberry, but for smaller volumes they’re fantastic.

The single most asked question is…”How do I setup my shiny new iPhone for my email?”. Or in more tech terms, “How do I configure Exchange sync on my new iPhone?”. Now this is of course only relevant if you have an Exchange server to connect to, which most of our clients do. It’s a really simple process. Check it out below.

First of all, let’s go back to the main menu. You can get there by pressing the ‘Home’ button in the very bottom centre of your iPhone.

Now tap on the button labelled ‘Mail’. In the picture to the left, it’s on the very bottom row, second from the left. You can customise where your buttons are though, so yours may be in a different spot.

The next thing you’ll see is a choice of what type of email server you want to connect to. For the purposes of this exercise, tap on ‘Microsoft Exchange’.

Now here’s where I think most people get a bit worried. Don’t. It’s pretty straight forward. Just enter the information in each field then tap ‘Next’. If you’re note sure what goes in a field, just give the helpdesk a call, and we can help you out. Here’s what I’d put in my setup…

Email: ben@grassrootsit.com.au (see, easy huh?)

Domain: grassrootsit

Username: Ben (this is usually the bit of your email address before the @)

Password: xxxxxx (your normal email password, like you use to access the webmail)

Description: Just ignore this field.

Once you’ve clicked ‘Next’ from the previous step you may come back to a screen that looks the same. Look carefully and there’s actually a new field there called ‘Server’.

Most of the time you’ll want to enter ‘mail.’ followed by your email domain. So for example, my email domain is ‘grassrootsit.com.au’ (the bit of my email address after the @), so I would enter mail.grassrootsit.com.au. Tap ‘Next’.

Some people may see a warning that says “Unable to Verify Certificate”. This usually means that your server is using a self-signed certificate. It’s pretty geeky, and we’re happy to explain what that means, but for now just click “Accept”.

OK, almost there. The settings on this screen are really up to you, but most people would set all three to ‘On’. When you’re happy with your choices, tap ‘Done’ and..well.. you’re done!

So there you go. Amazingly quick and easy. Now on rare occasions we have seen people have trouble with this setup. For those times, here’s a couple of the common reasons.

Typos. So the iPhone keyboard can take a day or two to get used to, so making a typo can be a common mistake. Go back over your settings and just make sure everything has been entered correctly. If it looks fine, cancel the process and start from scratch.

Data Pack. Your phone account will need a data pack on it. More specifically, it will need an iPhone data pack. Normally the telco’s won’t miss you on this one, but it has happened. If nothing else works, call your telco (eg: Telstra, Optus, etc) and confirm that your account is setup for an iPhone.

Happy iPhoning !

Great pick up by Eriq over on his blog about the latest iPhone software update (v3.1) breaking integration with Microsoft Exchange 2007. In short, this only effects older iPhone models. Check Eriq’s blog for more details…

http://msmvps.com/blogs/onq/archive/2009/09/14/iphone-os-3-1-breaks-exchange-connectivity.aspx