Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP

I suspect I am not the only on to have been seduced by the ’shiny shiny’ ** – Setting things up on the iPhone is actually pretty simple,  the hardest part was finding the server URL .

Server URL for EMEA: red002.mail.emea.microsoftonline.com

I suspect you can guess the one for the USA, but to be sure you can get this by going to Accounts in Outlook,  select your BPOS account and choose Change. 

You will see a screen similar to this, and you will see that the Microsoft Exchange server is pointing to a local server – this is how they get the single sign on to work.

Click on More Settings -> Choose the Connection Tab -> Click on the Exchange Proxy Settings.

This will show you the actual server URL that you will need to use on the iPhone.

On the iPhone

Choose Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account.

Select Microsoft Exchange  (if you already have one setup you will need to delete it first as you can only connect to one exchange account).

Enter your email address, the username is also the email address and your password.   No need to enter a domain so leave it blank.

Click next and accept the certificate error.

Enter the server name (see above), excluding the https:// prefix

Click next and the account should be verified and you are good to go.

One of the great things about BPOS is that ActiveSync is included by default on all accounts,  previously I had to pay an additional fee for every account.

** Frankie Boyle – Look at the Shiny Shiny  (Please note Frankie Boyle is likely to offend)

A quick post as this problem took me some a while to resolve.   I dropped my iPhone which forced it to do a reset,  nothing appeared to be broken and it started up without any real issues,  that was with the exception of the email.  I use Exchange 2007 email hosting and the emails appeared to be getting pushed to the my iPhone ok; I could read the summary but every email I tried to view I just got the message

‘this message has not been downloaded from the server’

Having tried numerous things to fix it, different connectivity like WiFi and 3G I could not get the email content to download.   I even deleted the account and re-added it, all the messages got loaded but again all I could see was the summary view.  Eventually after searching various forums I saw a recurring suggestion that turned out to be the solution.  If the Date and Time on the phone is wrong then you get this problems with email.  Most threads talked about POP3, however it was enough to get me to check – and sure enough the date on the phone had reset to the year 2000.

Correcting the date and time however did not immediately solve the problem,  I no longer had the ‘this message has not been downloaded from the server’ message the contents of the email was just blank. 

I had to delete and re-add the account after setting the time.

Not SharePoint related I know but something that I thought worth blogging as its one of those annoying issues that the solutions seems to be totally unrelated.