Held to an unreasonable standard

| 5 Comments
Yesterday morning we took the first user-visible step in our Exchange 2010 migration. We put the Exchange 2010 Client Access servers into place as our OWA servers. Since we have no one in an Exchange 2010 mailbox, all they'll do is proxy incoming connections to the old 2007 CA servers. Nothing should change in the end-user experience.

However, something else has cropped up.

We actually got the first few reports last week when Entourage stopped working reliably. After the 2010 swap, some mobile devices had their ActiveSync stop working.

We caught some fire today because we didn't catch the fact that certain ActiveSync setups don't work with Exchange 2010. The Android and iOS devices we tried all worked, so we just presumed it wasn't a big problem. Apparently that's wrong.

It seems that the DroidX and certain iOS versions under 4.2 don't sync correctly with Exchange 2010 ActiveSync. It just so happens that a Dean was using an iOS device running a 3.something version and was out of luck, and Deans are high enough the food chain to make their pain felt. We felt it.

The Mobile space is highly, highly fragmented. We simply do not have the resources to test and validate each OS rev on each hardware device out there and provide a 'How To' page for everything. Being expected to provide this is unreasonable. Unfortunate, but unreasonable.

We do warn people that using ActiveSync is a 'best effort' solution. However, today's 'best effort' is tomorrow's broken critical service.

The solution right now is to upgrade your iOS or not use DroidX. The iOS upgrade is free. DroidX users are out of luck until Motorola fixes the problem. There is nothing we can do about that.

5 Comments

What about the TouchDown app for Droid users?

I realize now I spelled Droid wrong...this make Lucas sad ;-)

Things like this drive me nuts. I dearly wish that the end user could understand how difficult something like this is.

Do you happen to know what versions of Android worked well for you?

Touchdown is a much better application for Exchange sync... not too pricey.