Caught between a rock and a hard place…
This is how you can feel sometimes, especially when your Droid phone connects with no issues but the iPhone (iPad or iPod too) just will not connect. After researching I found out that having Forms Based Authentication enabled was the culprit.
Feeling squished…
FBA is great because it gives your users a nice web page (that you can customize) for logging into Outlook Web Access. If you disabled FBA you will not see this nice page and just receive a popup login message, ugly.
This has been enabled on my clients domain for years and almost all users are used to the custom OWA login page and definitely do not want to see a popup. We need to find a way to support both options..
Enable iPhones while Keeping FBA Enabled
This is amazingly simple and can be done without restarting the server (only the IIS Admin service needs to be restarted). You should be using an Exchange Front End server, but this will also work if you only have a 1 server configuration.
- Open IIS Manager from Administrator Tools
- Right click the Exchange folder and select All Tasks and click Save Configuration to a File
- Save wherever you like with whatever name you like
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- Now right click the Default Web Site and select New and click Virtual Directory from File
- Browse for the file you just saved
- Click Read File
- Select Exchange below and click OK
- Since Exchange already exists type in exchange-oma (case-sensitive) as the alias.
- Right click the new virtual directory and select Properties
- Click the Directory Security tab
- Under Secure Communication click Edit
- Make sure Require SSL is unchecked
- You can now close IIS Manager
- Click Start then Run and type in regedit then click OK
- Find this key
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MasSync\Parameters
- If there is no ExchangeVDir key then you need to create it
- Right-click Parameters select New and then click String Value
- In the Value data box you must enter a forward slash (/) following by exchange-oma and click OK
- Restart the IIS Admin Service via Services in Administrator Tools (or any other way you like – net stop/start)
Test your Apple iX device, you should be good…
Thanks to Chicago Tech for the help!
- Creating a secondary virtual directory for ActiveSync and OMA access
- Add/modify a registry value to point to the exchange-oma
Jim Gaudet - Exchange Server 2003 on iPhone with Forms Based Authentication
