Yeah, it's finally done. After spending hours to try to figure it out, I finally got my iPhone 3G hooked up with our office Exchange server.
One nice thing about the new iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 software is the native support for Microsoft Exchange because Apple finally licensed Microsoft ActiveSync from Microsoft. It delivers pushing email, calendar, and contacts. The first thing I tried after I had my iPhone 3G is to try to connect it to the office Exchange server but no success. It passed the authentication part but sync'd null after.
I left there for a week or two until my assistant Lee passed around this Microsoft KB which obviously related to the issue we were having. I didn't follow all of them but changed some obvious ones and all of sudden it started working, email flows in while events shows in my calendar on iPhone. Here is things I thought is necessary to get it work.
- Port 80 and 443 need to be opened on firewall.
- The site that has OWA and OMA has to have both 80 and 443 opened.
- OWA (domain/exchange) has to be put on SSL as required to secure the communication.
- Follow the Microsoft KB 817379 to make an alternative exchange-oma for Microsoft ActiveSync Server with SSL not required.
And last, if the Exchange email account you created on iPhone isn't working, you have to delete it and recreate it as new to test. I still have the following error message showing up on Exchange server event log but it doesn't seem to matter anymore as emails still flow.
Unexpected Exchange mailbox Server error: Server: [xxx] User: [xxx] HTTP status code: [400]. Verify that the Exchange mailbox Server is working correctly.
Exchange server 2007 offers a better tools and ways to manage mobile users and devices but not so many on 2003. So next step, I will have to find a way how to secure the system tightly.