At my last job, I was one of the first people in the company to get an iPhone. As cool as it was to be amongst the ‘early adopters’, it turned out to be quite frustrating because I endured the pain of having to go without a proper work email solution before many others (all the Blackberry users mocked me for getting a toy phone, not a business phone). At first I was able to get over this by contacting the IT department and requesting a hard-forward to a Gmail address – this sufficed, but I didn’t have my work calendar synced and any email replies I sent from my iPhone were sent from Gmail, not my work domain. I had to keep pressing for a proper solution.

Fortunately for me I worked with several tech-savvy fellas and one discovered a workaround. Instead of connecting to the MS Exchange Server, which required ActiveSync (not used by many organizations), we would simply connect to the webmail client (Note: if your office email does not have a webmail service i.e. Webex, this solution will not work). Because we had that service, it worked like a charm. Here’s how to set it up on your phone:

• Within Settings, select the Mail, Contacts, Calendars icon. Click Add Account.
• Select Microsoft Exchange.
• Enter the following information:
  • Your work email address – I trust you can figure this one out.
  • For the Domain, Username & Password fields – enter the same information that you would find/use when logging into your workstation at the office (or work laptop). If you can’t remember, set up the iPhone email in front of your office computer for reference.
  • For Description, enter your work email address again.
• Click Done.
• The verification will fail – don’t worry, this is all part of the process. It will then ask if you would like to Cancel or Accept. Click Accept.
• You will then be prompted to enter the Server Address. This will be the address of your webmail service, such as webex.companyname.com. Be sure to leave out the http:// and any extensions after the .com (or .ca). For example, webex.companyname.com/exchange will not work.
• Submit this and Presto! You have your email client set up on the iPhone.

 

It’s up to you to set up whether you’d like to sync the email, contacts and calendar, as well as the Fetch/Push settings for your work email. If email is critical to the way you do business, I would recommend setting email to the Push function. Be sure to keep SSL certificates on (default setting is ON) if you want your Outlook email folders to be replicated in your iPhone.

A caveat to be aware of: depending on the security settings arranged by your IT department, you may be required to add an alphanumeric passcode to your iPhone. This is the case at my new company. Although it’s an inconvenience, it’s definitely not a large enough issue to prevent me from keeping this setup.

Please let me know if you try this and run into problems; I’d be happy to try troubleshooting with you for this. I just might not be able to get back to you quickly as I’ll be busy for the next few weeks setting up all the other iPhone users in my new organization… and now that many Blackberry users in my office are seriously contemplating the switch to iPhone, it could set me back a bit further!