Exchange Security Policy - Get Rid of the Autolocking

[stroths]

10/2008 UPDATE: Looked at the thread and the author has a new version. Here is the LINK

Description - LINK

Some Exchange hosting providers force a security policy on any PPC paired to Exchange. This policy makes you put in a PIN number or password at a set interval if you are inactive. Some are strict and have it set every 5 minutes while others let you set it to 24 hours. For many, this is extremely annoying.

I ran across this app that disables the need to enter the password/pin. The only time you should be prompted is when the phone first boots up. I tried this on my Wife's 6800 who uses 1and1's exchange service and it works well. I run my own Exchange 2007 server, so its not an issue for me.

How It Works
When Exchange enables a security policy it changes the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security\Policies\Policies\0000 1023 to a value of 0. This app monitors that key and changes it to 1 anytime the Exchange server modifies it. This eliminates the need for the password/pin except when you first boot it up.

This could also be handled by a simple mortscript, but this app is already written and works well.

Download
To download it, you must register at that forum and download the file labled "Zenyee.com Stay Unlock.zip"

Notes from Author
The only time you should be prompted for the pin/password is after a soft reset.

You should also get a message every 24 hours that the policy was enforced. (which the zen app instantly changes back)

The way to tell if it's working is:

1) you can change the unlock time out.
(where previsouly it would have been grayed to tha admin forced timeout out with no change possible)
I set mine to be 24 hours. You're better off using 24 hours. If you try to disale it all together I think active sync will complain to the server which will then force it again. (or something similar/lame to that effect)

2) the zenstayunlock will show up in your remove program list

Other Notes
This does not work for Goodlink users as Goodlink uses a different security policy. According to XDA you can accomplish the same thing by changing HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\GoodLink\Password. Set ITLocked to 0. This will un-gray the password box. If you need a similar app, I would suggest you look into writing a mortscript app that checks this value and updates it if it changes.