Configure Your iPhone to Connect to Microsoft Exchange

When one of the key players at the company I work at picked up an iPhone, I was super stoked to play around with it. My boss and my colleague had been playing with it for quite some time trying to get it connected to our Exchange server. As simple and intuitive that the iPhone is, connecting it to our Exchange server was quite troublesome. After they played with it for a few hours, and failed to connect it to Exchange, they gave me the phone so that I could give my best shot at it. When I tried it, I had also failed. Why would Apple create such a nice and intuitive product, but not make it easy to connect with Exchange?

A week later, my colleague figured out what was the problem. The first is that the iPhone is going to connect to the web to access the Exchange server. What does this mean to you? The incoming mail server will be the address that you access your webmail from. Here at work, we use the format mail.company.com.

The second challenge was getting the iPhone to authenticate properly with the Exchange server. This was the larger or the two challenges. We were going out of our minds trying to figure this out. Typically, when you log on to your webmail account, you only need to enter your user name and password to authenticate. This method fails on the iPhone. Okay, thats no problem, maybe we just need to specify a domain as well. So we then tried to enter the domain and the username. We tried to enter this in the format of company\username. This failed. We gave Apple a call and told them our troubles only to get the response of "Those settings should work." Yesterday, however, my colleague decided just to enter the full email address as the user name and provided the user's password. Like magic, the iPhone connected and downloaded all of the email messages on the exchange server. Great success!

In recap, here is what you really need to know.

• Enter the URL that you use to connect to webmail as your incoming mail server on your iPhone (mail.company.com)
• Enter your full email address as your user name (joe.schmoe@company.com)