If you've not heard; Apple released iPhone 2.0 today which includes a software update to the existing iPhones in the market (yes, we mentioned it when it was announced as well). We're thrilled to add them to the family of Exchange ActiveSync licensees that enable all sorts of devices to connect to Exchange Server. For those of you that manage Exchange Servers this means you may see some new devices connecting and we wanted to give you a few notes about what to expect.
What iPhone looks like from an Administrator's perspective
From the server side, you need to look at a user's device from the Exchange Management console:
From the user screen you can scroll though any devices the users has connected to their account (iPhone circled here - note that the version number will vary by iPhone firmware version, we took this screenshot with beta firmware):
Users using OWA will see their iPhones showing up in the Options > Mobile Device screen as shown in the image below:
Note: If you want to look for connections in your IIS server logs you can do a string search for "Apple-iPhone".
How do I find out more info on what policies the iPhone supports, how it connects to your server and other administrative questions?
Apple has published an Enterprise Deployment Guide for organizations that are deploying iPhones. This is where you should look for Administrator info on the technical side of what Apple has created.
How can I see how many iPhones are connecting to my server and which users have them?
To see how many users have iPhones and who they are, go though the following steps:
First you need to open an Exchange Management Shell window and execute the following command:
export-activesynclog -Filename:<IISlog dir>\*.log -outputpath:<output path>
An example is shown below though we just parsed one of the logs for simplicity.
Now open the file Users.csv in Excel. Below you can see the first three columns of this spreadsheet that we're sorted by column C (circled). You can see that by doing this you will be able to see all the iPhones grouped together and their owners will be listed in column A (circled):
What are your experiences?
So now you know what the iPhone will look like connected to your servers using Exchange ActiveSync (instead of IMAP) and how to find out who is using them in your organization. We're glad to have Apple connecting their devices to Exchange Server and hope you have fun using these tools to stay informed about when iPhones connect to your Exchange Server. We're always looking to hear how people are using our technology and we'd love to hear your experiences; are you seeing iPhones show up in your organization? What experiences are your users having? Let us know.
- Adam Glick