Sys Admin Tales » Phones

Now I’m part of the iCrowd

Tom Thrush — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 03:35:22 +0000

I finally caved and bought an iPhone. The tipping point was that my Verizon contract was up and I could save about $25/month by going to AT&T. (A friend of a friend is the store manager.)

It also helped that the iPhone 3Gs came out, offered a mature OS with a landscape keyboard and the big surprise, cut and paste.

I must say I’m rather enjoying the new phone; finding new Apps is rather addictive. The interface is pleasing and mostly intuitive, iPod functions are nicely done and most importantly, ActiveSync with Exchange works quite well.

I was rather dubious of the AT&T network, but so far so good.

More on being in the “iCrowd” later…

ActiveSync, Now Without Attachments

Tom Thrush — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 01:22:08 +0000

After migrating users from Exchange 2003 onto our 2007 cluster, we found that attachment viewing stopped working in ActiveSync.

The fix is to delete the ActiveSync profile on the phone (and maybe on the server, I did this via Outlook Web Access just to be sure) and then create a new one. There is a security policy on the CAS server end which gets set up when a new device connects, our theory is that if the phone doesn’t make a new connection to the Exchange 2007 server, that security policy never gets pushed to the client and the server will refuse to download attachments to the phone.

You also have to allow attachments in the Default ActiveSync Client-access profile on the server (but this is enabled by default).

So, if you have users who say they get errors when downloading attachments to an ActiveSync phone, nuke the profile on the phone and recreate the association, it should then start working once again.

Wiping my Treo 700w

Tom Thrush — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:01:50 +0000

Just a few short days ago I bought a “new” phone. It was actually a purchase from Craigslist. My contract with Verizon is actually up tomorrow!!! After 10 years of locked in commitment, I’m done (at least until the next really great deal comes along :)

Changing to the new phone was a snap, I just called *228 and chose option 3 from the new phone. It was that easy to switch phones, and it didn’t actually involve a real person (are they passing those savings on to us? (I think not.)

So now my Palm Treo 700w is on Craigslist. Of course my info needs to be gone, and that’s simple to do as many sites show. I looked it up on the Michigan State Univ. site, so I’ll give them the credit.

What’s needed is a hard reset:
- Hold down the red power button while pushing in the reset button under the battery case lid. When it begin to reboot, it’ll ask if you want to erase all your information. (Should you have an SD card, it will be left in tact.)

As for my choice of phone, I got a VX6800 running Windows Mobile 6.1 and I’m very happy with it; but that’ll be another post…

Nokia Gets ActiveSync

Tom Thrush — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:14:00 +0000

Thanks to Mary Jo Foley for this update: Nokia’s S60 3rd Edition phones are getting ActiveSync. I currently use Netvigour Hosted Exchange for my mail, which allows me to have Outlook synchronized on all my systems plus have access to calendaring, contacts and mail on my Treo 700w (which btw, is underpowered and just plain old).

To my last point, I am now searching for a phone to replace my aged Palm. I’ve been with Verizon now for over nine years and my contract is ending this December. After all this time, it’s time to weigh my options and it’s great to have another few dozen phones thrown into the mix…