Cell phone's like the Treo and Motorola-Q (to name two) are great for relieving your stress. Find yourself wondering how long you've been driving to the client, asking yourself how many important messages you may have missed, or what your calendar has going on after lunch today, or what the address is of exactly where you're going. Those stresses add up, it's not the answer to stress in general, but there have always been and always will be plenty of things to stress about, a smart-phone configured properly with Exchange can certainly remove unnecessary anxiety. It's a great way to stay connected, and it's hitting like wildfire in mid-size businesses all across America. It starts off with the CEO and once the technology manager is approved to also purchase one, it slowly spreads across the entire company.



The technical issues involved are actually quite simple to overcome. The process is straight forward, your phone is configured to hit an exchange server, identify your exchange servers outside name or ip, and put it in your phone with your username/password/domain.

If you have SSL setup in your exchange OWA (outlook web access) then select secure, if not, don't. If you can hit your OWA mail.servername.com/exchange then your phone should sync.

Actually your phone may use mail.servername.com/oma (outlook mobile access), it will in-turn use mail.servername.com/microsoft-server-activesync

Security:

The default installation of exchange is configured with security low enough to let your phone in right away.

Your firewall would need to have port 80 open for OWA anyway, so there is no change required there by default, SSL is of course not default.

Later you may want to setup SSL, or you may have it already, port 443 is required in your firewall, but that's about it from a network perspective.

Once you know you can access /oma from outside via http or https as required you can lock down the users. Typically you can review the microsoft-server-activesync directory security settings in IIS and check basic, uncheck anonymous and integrated. At that point you should be good to go, however basic is clear-text, and if you are not running SSL your password could possibly be seen by a network sniffer. So add a certificate to your OWA, place that certificate in your phone, and you should be able to check secure to encrypt the traffic.

Once the infrastructure is setup at your office, the next phone is a breeze to configure (outside server-name, uid/pwd, done).

Give yourself a little stress relief; get your exchange to automatically push your messages and calendar items instantly to your phone. Often your phone will know you have a message before your outlook in the office does.