I was having some major issues getting ActiveSync to work with some Treo 700w’s we purchased for our sales force.
A lot of this was because of my inexperience with Exchange 2003, and Windows Mobile 5.
A few days ago after spending about 6 hours on this and some phone time with palm (which is a horrible experience by the way), I discovered that you can’t sync both to the server and to a PC. Technically you can except for the email, but you want that to sync via the server anyways to get up to date email. So I pretty much left all the USB cables in the box.
I was using a “homegrown” certificate for my OWA SSL setup. As a result was also getting a sync code (I can’t recall which it was) that there was a certificate issue with the server. After further searching I found out that homegrown certificates do not play well with wm5 and the treo700w. The palm site recommended a few trusted vendors for this phone on their site. So I went and bought a shiny new certificate from entrust.com. This was a very good experience. The sales/ technical people were extremely friendly and spoke to you in lay mens terms. They were also very professional and knew their stuff.
After requesting and installing the certificate (which only took about 3 hours to get configured and delivered) I was still receiving an error code on the device. Error code 0×85010014. It came with a vague description of the code that there is “a problem with the exchange server”. I was able to get it to sync, but only with SSL disabled. When I enabled it, it timed out. Of course I didn’t want to run with it disabled because I was running OWA too and wanted it to remain secure. At this point I gave up and called in a consultant for help. I had already been working on this project for 3 days and just wanted it fixed.
In a nutshell here’s what he did. First he turned on forms based authentication on the exchange server. Secondly he properly configured OMA by using method 2 in KB817379.
Thats all it took. Apparently my OMA was not setup properly. Using method 2 we kinda rebuilt it. WHEW!
Recap:
Get a trusted public certificate.
Enable forms based authentication.
Make sure OMA is properly installed.
Side note:
You also need to make sure that the mobile services properties are set for mobile devices. (ESM–>Global Settings–>Mobile Services–>Properties)
Technorati Tags: Treo, 700w, Echange, ActiveSync, 0×85010014
