So I decided I wanted my XDA Exec to ActiveSync over 3G, and I wanted Push email. It was fairly straight forward. But my advice to anyone trying this is to read up on their equipment and make some decisions before you start, a good example of this is your choice of certificate. 

I’ve got my 2nd domain controller on the network, all good! Just got to deliver it to it’s new location (that’s next week).
So i decided to move on to getting myself (and my directors of course) access to out information while on the move. Exchange 2003 SP2 has mobile features built in. The 1st thing I looked at was getting Activesync to work over 802.11, GPRS, and 3G. I had done this before but that was a test and I didn’t have any encryption then. I now have my certificate server installed and assigned a certificate to my exchange server. After turning on the ‘enable user initiated synchronisation” in exchange I started a synchronise from my PDA very soon after I got an error code.

The message basically said it didn’t like my certificate, after about three quarters of an hour of head scratching I realised I had the wrong name on the certificate, after correcting this I tried again, only to get another one. This one is because I choose to use a self signed certificate and not opt for a 3rd party. Realising this I exported the certificate from the exchange server and installed it to my laptop. It is worth pointing out here that I read a few articles from MS on this and found that some wireless operators disable the option to install self signed certificates to your mobile device. It is worth checking, although MS do have a program to get around this called smartphoneaddcert.exe. Have a look here for more info http://support.microsoft.com/?id=841060

After installing my certificate (I didn’t need the tool) I tried ActiveSync and my PDA was updated!

Feeling a sense of god like power now I felt it time to conquer Push email. Once I had the certificate installed this was actually very straight forward. All I had to do was once again enable it within exchange inside mobile messaging. Turn on push email on the device and hey presto! Emails were getting to my device from hotmail  between 40secs – 1minute.

Also while I was tinkering with Exchange’s many settings I stumbled across the connection filtering tab on the properties page of message delivery. This will let exchange query a real time black list (list of know spammers and open relays) when it receives an email and if the sender is on the list, the email is rejected. The list I chose was http://www.spamhaus.org/

Have a look, as it’s not just a spam filter, but it will also encourage genuine companies with open relays to stop them.

So that is pretty much the story of my exchange upgrade and new DC, I will take a step back from the server side for my next post, I have some Office stuff I will be posting.

Arron