Any Exchange admins here?

[Holo20]

I manage a couple of small 2003 and 2007 Exchange organizations, and was just wondering if there was anyone else here to 'talk shop' with in regards to keeping the Windows Mobile devices happy...

-Michael

[EvilRSA]

So far, I've wanted to take our Exchange 2003 server running on Windows 2000 "out back" and shoot it in the face (or the front bezel rather). I finally got my Samsung IP-830w working pretty good on it, and two others have Palms running Palm OS, that sucked! I told them to take them back to Sprint and throw them at what ever sales rep told them that the Palm OS is better for connecting into Outlook and Exchange than the Palm running Windows. Anyway, they came back with two Palm 700wx's and the two they got were beyond the worst ones ever made, I'm sure of it, they had to be. They gave up on these Palms after about 3 months of nothing but fighting tooth and nail with them and just came in the other day with iPhones, and handed them to me and said "Make them work, they have a 'option' for exchange and everything; shouldn't be a problem, right?" I sighed slightly and said, "Well, it shouldn't be, but we'll see."

I now understand why I never really wanted the iPhone, I just didn't know why at the time, but god, I know now! Sure, they look great, all sexy and sleek, but damn, supporting an Apple product in a MS environment.....just shoot me now, please.

[Holo20]

Yeah, my buddy said the same thing... AT&T bought out CellularOne, and finally opened shop up here last week, on a Sunday. The top four executives at his company all went out that Sunday and bought iPhones, then gave them to him on Monday and said "hook our email up to them", which was Exchange. They had previously been using WM5 devices. He shook his head and said, "Well, leave the phone here and come back in a few days, and I'll see what I can come up with." The experience wasn't at all what they had before. They were pissed, and so was he.

I've actually only held and messed around with an iPhone for about 5 minute's worth of time. The GUI is incredible, and the whole experience is pretty nice, but it isn't for me.

My provider keeps telling me "any day now" the PPC6800 will show up here, I'm so stoked.

What are your issues w/ Exch 2k3?

[EvilRSA]

So far....I really don't think I've had too many "Exchange" problems....I think all of the issues I've had with exchange are other things that interface with it or that exchange is dependent on....

for one....we have issues with our Exchange not sending mail to certain domains, some days, and other days no issues, and still yet other days; its completely different domains that it has problems with. It basically will say, I'm sorry Hotmail.com isn't a valid domain. But really, I want to say that its all a DNS issue. so I have it sending all out bound mail to another server (My personal mail server for my domain, housed on the same network) and it handles all the outbound for the exchange system.

another issue is IIS and some services on the system; lets just say......reboots are a nail biter - You never know if its going to reboot cleanly or it services will hang. Long and short of it is, the server needs to be taken down, and freshly installed...but doing that is also a bit of an under taking...and so far.....if it hasn't just fallen over on its side and died yet.....we'll get to it in a little bit. LOL

The Server upgrade is starting to move along now though..(2 years after we noticed we needed to do it) looking forward to Server 2003 with Exchange 2007...

but in regard to the iPhone, we where never running IMAP or an externally accessable SMTP port, both of which the iPhone needs for its "pretend Exchange" support.

[craigreilly]

I am running Exch2007 on Win2003. I also needed some new hardware to support 64 bit. Once I got the machine up and running, Exchange easily moved our mailboxes for us. We did this 1 at a time so we could call our people in the field and have them change their Outlook settings to the New Server.
We are still using our old Exch2000 box for Spam filtering (kind of link an Edge server) as the 64-bit version is still in Alpha.
As far as WM6 Activesync - not bad. I wish when I deleted on my phone that is auto synced with the server to remove. But no big deal. I get mail often enough that it updates itself. Sometimes, I will see a message as NEW again on my desktop even though I read it on my phone - but have not received any messages since I read it.