This blog post is probably out of date. If you want to set up Exchange ActiveSync, you should instead consult one my guides:
	iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Setup		iPad Exchange ActiveSync Setup
	iPhone ActiveSync Troubleshooting		iPad ActiveSync Troubleshooting

Here’s a quick tip, but a timely one now that the iPhone supports multiple Exchange ActiveSync servers: Although Google supports the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to synchronize mail, contacts, and calendars between Gmail and mobile devices, it is not active by default for custom Google Apps domains. It’s pretty easy to enable it, though.

How To Enable Google Sync

For example, my fosketts.net domain uses Google Apps (mail, calendars, etc) but could not sync with iOS 4. I had to go into the Domain Dashboard to enable it. Here’s how:

1. Navigate to your Google Apps domain’s Mobile Settings dashboard. The URL is as follows, though of source with “example.com” replaced by your domain name.

   https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/example.com/MobileSettings

2. In this window, select the box next to “Enable Google Sync”
3. Click “Save changes” and you’re good to go! You may need to wait a few minutes for the change to go into effect, however.

Note: It took hours for this change to take effect! If your iPhone says “Cannot Get Mail” and “The connection to the server failed”, just wait longer…

You must enable "Google Sync" in the Mobile Settings dashboard before using ActiveSync with a Google Apps account

Google Sync Limitations

Note that Google Sync is somewhat quirky and limited compared to full ActiveSync on an exchange server. Among the notable differences:

1. Searching of server-side email doesn’t work
2. “Delete” = “Archive” by default
3. Advanced recurring events don’t work
4. The number of phone numbers and email addresses is limited

Setting Up Your Mobile Device With Google Sync

Finally, here are a few how-to’s for setting up mobile devices to access Google Sync:

1. Use your full Google Apps email address as your user name (e.g. “you@example.com”) rather than just your username (e.g. “you”)
2. Use “m.google.com” as the Exchange ActiveSync server name
3. Enable SSL
4. Give it some time to sync – changes might not show up right away

Troubleshooting Google Sync

Apple seems to have used an incorrect (too short) Exchange server timeout. If you are running iOS 4.0, you should install the Exchange timeout profile (per Apple TS3398) by clicking here from the iPhone and rebooting.

I had a heck of a time getting this to work with my iOS 4-equipped iPhone 3GS. But it did finally work. Here’s what I learned:

• It can take a while for this to take effect. Be patient and don’t throw your phone through the window.
• Even once it does work, it can be flaky at first. Perhaps it takes a while for all of Google’s servers to recognize the change?
• Even if everything is entered correctly, iOS 4 may not connect. It didn’t seem to want to retry the Exchange ActiveSync connection after it failed (because Google hadn’t activated Sync yet). To get around this, go into Settings->Mail and re-enter the account password. This seems to force a complete retry and opened the floodgates for me.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | How To Enable ActiveSync For Google Apps Accounts
This post was categorized as Apple, Everything, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Note: This post is about Google, because it is by far the dominant search engine, advertiser, and “portal” in the English-speaking world. Nearly everything mentioned here applies equally to other search engines and advertising providers.

Ranking Pages

Google’s relevance comes from their historical ability to present a quality searchable portal to the entire Internet. The majority of Google’s revenue is also derived from quality information, giving them the ability to present more-compelling advertising to web users.

Google’s core success is based on its ability to discover and rank the quality of Internet content. Gmail, Reader, Picasa, Apps, and the rest of the Google properties are surely excellent sources of information on the preferences of individual users, but they contribute only slightly to the other side of the coin: Information about Internet content. For that, they still rely on the core technology invented at Stanford a decade ago: PageRank.

Every time it encounters a link, Google’s software “spider” follows it, adding the content of the linked web page to an index. Google, like other early search engines, counts each link as a vote for the quality of the page. The genius of PageRank is that Google weights each vote based on the quality of the page it comes from. Although PageRank is not the entirety of Google, it is a singular key element.

Put simply, Google’s success depends on its ability to gather and rank the links we all make and match them to the data we provide about ourselves. Without this, Google will fail.

The Changing Web

The graphical Web is not the Internet. My first experiences online came well before graphical hypertext clients (what we now call browsers) dominated the user experience and became the web. Although the network we call the Internet now supports a very wide variety of traffic, Google’s preeminence comes only from the Web. They have little or no reach into the massive streams of corporate data, multimedia, and other non-hypertext content streaming across the ‘net.

When it was first developed, the web was manual and links were hand-selected and carefully put into context. It was difficult to put together a web page, and those pages that were developed were were static. The social networks of the time (USENET, IRC, and email mostly) were not integrated into the web, did not generally include links. So the first search engines, and later ones like Google, focused on this relatively small pool of pages and links.

But the web soon became automated, subsuming most other interactive services. Social (user-generated) interaction moved into the web in a big way, with blogs, wikis, and discussion forums enabling rapid content creation and reference by users. Sharing links in the social web, and through social bookmarking services, generally replaced the manual pages of old.

At first, this explosion of user-generated content was a dream scenario for Google. They could harvest the collective intelligence of us all to identify and rank content. But as the number of pages and links exploded, the notion of a “web page” was radically shifted from a stable and predictable set of data to a dynamic portal into a vast store of content. Where everyone once saw the same content at a given URL, now each of us has his own experience.

Spammers and scammers realized the value of Google placement and flooded this dynamic social web with links. This threatened not only to undermine the relevance that supports Google’s search (and advertising) business, but it also threatened these new social services themselves. Each honest, relevant link added to a Wikipedia article, included in a Slashdot comment, or shared on a service like Digg was dwarfed by the thousands or millions of spam links injected to boost the PageRank of “client” sites.

I Don’t Follow

Google and the social net fought valiantly against this wave of link spam, but it became clear that something more radical was needed. The only way to fight spam was to make it useless to the spammers. Thus was born a simple but highly-effective tool: Nofollow.

Webmasters long had the ability to tell the Google spider to ignore a certain set of hosted pages through the use of a server-side list called robots.txt. But spammers wanted the exact opposite. What was needed was a client-side way to specify that a link was not worthy of being spidered and ranked by the search engines. This would eliminate the primary benefit of link spam.

Implementing client-side spider blocking was trivial: A simple tag, “rel=nofollow”, was added alongside the url in a web link. This way, Google’s spider would simply ignore every “nofollow” link it encountered, and they would never be searched or ranked in the index.

But spammers would never put the nofollow tag in their own links. So sites quickly began implementing blanket nofollow policies: Every link submitted by users in any form would receive the tag by default. The idea would be that links that had not yet been vetted by users would get the nofollow tag and those that were deemed acceptable would not. But most sites never figured out the right process to allow the nofollow tag to be removed. Today, nearly every social service, from FaceBook to Twitter to Digg to StumbleUpon, permanently marks nearly every link this way. Even Wikipedia, a long-time holdout, finally switched to a default nofollow on all but the English site.

The Nofollow War

What does this mean for Google? If the vast majority of user-generated links are tossed into the spam category as far as the search engine is concerned, it means that their entire system of discovering and ranking links is in jeopardy. The major social services, most of which attract the majority of end-user traffic, content, and links, are rendered useless in generating relevancy.

But these are the exact sources that Google ought to be focusing on the most. Many have noted that they hear about news more rapidly through real-time sources like Twitter than through less-dynamic traditional news sites and blogs. Even if Google had the ability to spider a service like Twitter in real time, which is doubtful, they would gain no insight from the links included in these sources. Social bookmarking sites like Digg are chock full of user-vetted links and should be gold mines for Google, but the nofollow tag makes them invisible.

This scarcity of user-generated links has made the links that are followable even more valuable. Scammers constantly create fake blogs of scraped (read “stolen”) content and users are paid to include followable links anywhere they can. Sites with a high PageRank value are constantly inundated with offers and attacked by hackers to siphon off high-value “votes”.

High-profile content providers are circling their wagons, drastically cutting down on outside links in order to focus PageRank on their own properties. Smaller publishers and blogs are striking back at the big guys, decrying their dearth of external links. Some even go so far as to initiate blanket nofollow policies against these big, respected, but non-linking sites.

This leaves Google with even fewer useful links with which to examine the Web. It also leaves the biggest content providers and networks and the savviest search engine optimization (SEO) pros with a bigger slice of the valuable top-of-Google result real estate.

The Fix Is In

Google is left with a looming nightmare scenario: As smaller, alternative, social, and real-time content providers disappear from the search engine, its overall relevance and value declines. Soon, a tipping point will be reached when users would rather rely on Twitter, FaceBook, and the rest for their Internet interactions than the old-fashioned search engine, email, and RSS readers that Google currently dominates. This house-of-cards collapse can only be avoided by including user-generated content in the Google index.

Search engines could simply ignore the nofollow tag, wading into the social stream and combatting spam in other ways. But this would lead to another rapid upswing of link spam, shifting the burden to content providers once again. And it might also expose links that actually should not be followed, leading to technical and even legal trouble.

The best solution would see the social networks designing in some method of removing the nofollow attribute once links are verified to be relevant and correct. But there is no incentive for them to help drive Google traffic to other sites. Indeed, Twitter recently took the next step, arranging the titles of user pages in an attempt to SEO their way to the top page of Google searches for user’s names. Only altruistic systems like Wikipedia are likely to design in this type of response.

Another possible scenario (to be explored another day) is the usurpation of today’s social web and its content by a new next-generation service. A web-based social client like FriendFeed could rapidly siphon away both existing and net-new content and users in the guise of openness and interoperability. Although new web spiders like Cuil have failed, perhaps old-fashioned crawling capability is no longer all that valuable in the social web.

The most likely fix is both predictable and pragmatic: Google must buy all successful source of social links (like Twitter, Bit.ly, StumbleUpon, and even FaceBook) and integrate them into their search system. Owning Twitter would enable Google to decide which links to follow and which to ignore. The reward of improving search results would be the incentive needed to add “re-follow” capability. Buying these services would also give Google an open pipe of the real-time traffic flowing through these services, a critical resource that they currently lack.

Google simply can not afford not owning the real-time web, and they must continue to buy up similar sources of content as they appear. Yahoo was unable to extract value from StumbleUpon, but Google’s other competitors will certainly try to undermine the search giant. Frankly, I’m shocked that Microsoft, FaceBook, or even Baidu have not yet snapped up services like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Digg even if only to keep them and the information they contain out of Google’s hands.

If you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably also like my Foskett Services blog!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Google Is Heading For A Cliff; What Will They Do?
This post was categorized as Computer History, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

IT infrastructure is following consumer technology out of the data center glass house and into the wide world

Dave Hitz over at NetApp poses a very interesting question: What is the ten-year trend in information technology that we are currently building to? He supplies these historical examples:

• 1982-1992: A computer on every (business) desk
• 1990s: Networking all those computers

He then goes on to suggest three ten-year trends that we might currently be living through:

1. Cloud/Outsourced Computing
2. Server Virtualization
3. Flash Memory

Although I agree on the importance of these three to enterprise IT, I don’t think they’ll be seen as the megatrends of this decade in hindsight. I suggest that, more than anything, we are witnessing a wholesale shift from information tied to place/device to information mobility. Cloud computing, server virtualization, and even flash memory are all contributors to this massive trend, along with the user-side trends of the post-PDA mobile phone, 3G data, social web services, and connected home.

What Is Mobility?

The meaning of mobility, to me, is expansive. It doesn’t just refer to taking a copy of your data with you, ubiquitous connectivity, or portable devices. Mobility is a new paradigm of computing.

• Your data no longer “sits” in one place – your data lives out there in the network!
• Your applications no longer “live” on this device or that – your applications live out there in the network!
• Your productivity environment no longer requires a particular piece of hardware – you expect to be productive everywhere on every device!

This doesn’t sound strange to the modern Internet user. We have completely accepted the role of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia and the rest in our personal lives. Just as they did in the early days of the PC, business people have transitioned these concepts into the professional world – witness Salesforce and LinkedIn! In all cases, we have endorsed the idea that certain types of information want to live in the cloud because it makes them better!

Once you’ve used these services, old-fashioned email, contact management, encyclopedias, maps, and the rest seem incredibly limiting. A GPS system that can’t update its maps seems antiquated, and we want it to have real-time traffic data, too. An iPod that needs to be physically connected to a PC to add music or applications is simply unacceptable. Time- and place-shifting technologies like TiVo To Go, over-the-air podcast downloads, and Slingboxes reset our expectations about availability and choice of entertainment, but they are mere symptoms of our changing perceptions. We want mobility of data, applications, and platforms, and we are getting it.

Consider two truly revolutionary platforms: the iPhone and the netbook. In both cases, we knowingly accept limitations in the name of portability, knowing that the cloud will give us what we can’t hold in our hands. These devices are limited in ways that would seem inconceivable just a few years ago: Apple has locked their platform up tighter than any in history, and netbooks are too small, underpowered, and cheap in all senses of the word. But we love them because they get us where we want to go, which is up and out!

Mobility and Enterprise IT

The concept of mobile data, applications, and devices is just as applicable to enterprise IT infrastructure as it is to personal technology. Some enterprise data must be kept close to the vest, especially where privacy laws and litigation concerns are applicable. But there is certainly a vast pool of corporate data that wants to be out working in the field! Setting this data free is the enterprise equivalent of the mobility megatrend!

Cloud computing is hype. Server virtualization is hype. Flash storage is hype. XaaS is hype. Web 2.0 is hype. But once the cloud of hype passes, we will be left with solid technologies to enable mobility and transform corporate computing. Why should corporate email have to punch through your firewall? Why should the intranet be limited to internal or VPN users? Why can’t customers interact with a (limited/controlled) set of your corporate records? Salesforce showed us that roaming users (sales teams) need greater access than most IT staff were ready to build. What if we applied the same ideas to other data types?

Many companies are already doing this. Microsoft offers a variety of internal/external services for their customers through Live (see Connect, for example). Many companies are using mail and productivity applications in the cloud from Google, MessageOne, and Zimbra. Backup and archiving as a service to mobile users is widespread (see Iron Mountain Connected and Mozy). And more and more corporate PR relies on blogs, twitter, and social networking sites. Corporate security and legal types are worried about data “escaping” from the eggshell of control they exert, but this cat is out of the bag. Enterprise IT will never be the same!

It comes down to a single core question that IT folks ought to have been asking themselves all along: What should be held internally and what should be let loose? We already “outsource” many non-core corporate functions. Sometimes we do this for cost reasons. But the most effective outsourcing decision is when a third party will do a better job, offering levels of expertise or service that an internal group could never realistically reach. We already buy enterprise software to leverage outside development (remember, this was not always the case!), so why not also buy enterprise services? Corporate-grade outsourced email, groupware, sales automation, and the like is not only more robust and less expensive than internal systems, they enable a disconnected, mobile workforce.

Today, I Was Angry

I bought a new album from Amazon, but I forgot to sync my iPhone with my laptop, so it was sitting at home when I wanted to listen to it in the car. Then I couldn’t find a colleague’s phone number because he moved to a new company and my address book didn’t automatically update. And I couldn’t review a presentation because I needed a special account to access a corporate document system behind a firewall.

These little accomplishments would have seemed like miracles just a few years ago: I remember the joy I felt ten years ago when I could read a web page offline on my Palm Pilot using AvantGo; I was amazed when I first fired up 802.11a wireless networking and could work anywhere in the office; I was gleeful to be able to take 5 GB of music with me on the train. But all this is past. Today, I want to access my portable data and work anywhere. We are in the midst of a revolution in the mobility and ubiquity of computing.

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Ten-Year Trend: Mobility
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Register online at Contoural’s web site!

E-mail Archiving 101: A Non-Technical Person’s Overview of How E-mail Archiving Works and How to Pick the Right Tool
Thursday, January 8, 2009
10:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Faculty: Independent expert Stephen Foskett, Principal Consultant, Contoural, Inc.

E-mail archiving systems are becoming an important component of many organization document retention and litigation preparedness strategy. Nevertheless, to the non-technical person, understanding what these systems do and how they are different can be bewildering or even downright confusing. A good idea sometimes gets lost in technical translation. In this webinar, industry expert and independent Contoural Principal Consultant Stephen Foskett will walk through a high-level overview of how these systems work in simple terms aimed at the non-technical person.

Topics include:

• What do e-mail archiving products do and how do they support litigation readiness?
• High-level description of how different products work and are used
• What are some of the real differences between systems?
• How to evaluate which features are best for your organization

This webinar will also provide time for questions from the audience.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Email Archiving 101 Webinar, January 8
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

The gist is that email archiving can be an incredibly useful tool to manage legal risks and enable more effective discovery of message content. Electronic discovery is growing at an amazing clip, and most cases now include email messages – in fact, email is estimated to be 60% to 70% of all legal discovery in the United States today!

At the same time, companies are challenged with ineffective or un-enforced retention and litigation hold policies and rampant “underground archiving” of messages in offline PST files. And to make matters worse, the 2006 revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure drastically shortened the amount of time companies have to describe and produce electronic records! It’s simply impossible to begin recovering messages from backup tapes in response to legal requests – the only way forward is a proactive strategy based on email archiving.

If this piques your interest, grab a copy of that whitepaper, join me on Wednesday for the webinar, and check out some of my other email-related content. I’ll also be speaking on the topic at Storage Decisions in San Francisco, and would be happy to respond to your emailed questions any time!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Six Critical Steps For Managing Email E-Discovery
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Although my email archiving session always attracts a smaller crowd, they are all a dedicated bunch. One pertinent suggestion from an attendee was to ingest PST files into a special separate archive in order to ensure that messages recovered from it are treated with the proper skepticism. Questions after the session focused on the trick of engaging legal and business people in the decisions around email policy, truly a challenge. I suggested that an on-site mini-seminar for the relevant folks might help to break the logjam and illustrate the issues, something that I would be happy to arrange!

My storage virtualization session was once again placed in the main room, and a much larger group attended it. I was interested to hear just how great the impact of VMware’s VDC-OS had been. In just a week, a dozen or more folks in the audience had heard, comprehended, and strategized about the concept. It’s really that big! Others were very interested in the topic of green metrics for data center usage. How does one monitor and report the real “green” savings (power, carbon, cooling, space) for a virtualized environment? Although storage greenness is debatable, the savings from a virtualized server environment are real, and these often bundle in some of the storage numbers, too.

These topics are top of mind to me as well, and I will continue to investigate (and speculate) about them in the coming year. If you missed the show (or the handouts), I will be posting them here soon! Get my email address or head to LinkedIn by clicking the links in the sidebar (at top left).

Watch this space, and consider coming to my virtualization seminar in Charlotte on October 21 or to the Storage Decisions show in San Francisco, held November 17 to 19.

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Storage Decisions New York 2008 Feedback
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This blog post is probably out of date. If you want to set up Exchange ActiveSync, you should instead consult one my guides:
	iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Setup		iPad Exchange ActiveSync Setup
	iPhone ActiveSync Troubleshooting		iPad ActiveSync Troubleshooting

I’ve been running OS 2.0 on my (first-generation) iPhone for a week and a half now, and as I mentioned before, Exchange ActiveSync push email, calendaring, and contacts was one of the main things Iwas looking for when I upgraded.  That article on setting up ActiveSync has since become my top blog post by far, pulling in literally thousands of hits per day, so I must not be alone in wanting this functionality.

But it turns out that the green grass of iPhone/Exchange integration has a tint of brown.  Folks have experienced issues getting the service set up, and it guzzles battery juice like a toddler at a lemonade stand.  Read on for my notes and suggestions…

For the most up-to-date information, see my iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide!

This post is part of my series focused on integrating the iPhone with Microsoft Exchange using ActiveSync:

• iPhone OS 3.0 information:
  1. First Look: iPhone 3.0 And Exchange ActiveSync Integration
  2. How To Subscribe To Internet Calendars In iPhone OS 3.0
  3. How To Access LDAP Directories In iPhone OS 3.0
  4. iPhone 3.0 Exchange ActiveSync: Better But Not Perfect
• How To Set Up iPhone Exchange ActiveSync
1. A Few iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Gotchas
2. Can the iPhone Sync With Multiple Exchange Servers?

Which Server?

By far the biggest problem folks have encountered when trying to enable Exchange ActiveSync on the iPhone has been finding the correct server name.  Update: It turns out that Exchange 2007 has an Autodiscovery service for ActiveSync devices, and the iPhone supports and attempts to use this.  But it will fail for anyone using Exchange 2003 or with an admin that turned this off…

If Autodiscovery fails, you have to manually enter the address.  Most Exchange implementations have a variety of different servers these days, each with a unique hostname and IP address:

• The main Exchange server, which is normally only used for internal or VPN connections to Outlook using the MAPI/RPC protocol and often has an excitingly-weird name like em22dc.yourcompany.com.  This is not what you are looking for.
• The external Exchange server for RPC over HTTPS connections from Outlook, which often has a nicer name like rpc.yourcompany.com.  This is also not what you’re looking for.
• The Outlook Web Access server used by Entourage and for accessing mail using a web browser, which is often called “owa.yourcompany.com”.  Getting warmer, but still not the right one.
• Entourage also uses an LDAP server, often called “ldap.yourcompany.com”, and might alias the OWA server as “dav.yourcompany.com”.  Still not the right server for the iPhone.
• The one you want is the ActiveSync server, sometimes called “oma.yourcompany.com” since it’s mainly used for Outlook Mobile on Windows Mobile devices.

If your techies don’t know the first thing about the iPhone, change your tactics.  Ask them which hostname they enter when configuring Windows Mobile smartphones and PDAs – these are very common, and this is the server you need with the iPhone!

One more thing:  You might get lucky and find that one of those other server names works for the iPhone’s ActiveSync.  This does not mean you’re using DAV or OWA on the iPhone – instead it means that they set up two services on the same hostname.  But I haven’t seen this myself.

The Problem With Push

Let me start by saying that, so far, the push email experience with Exchange ActiveSync to the iPhone has been flawless for me. Amazingly, messages appear on my iPhone before they show up in Outlook on my PC, which is online with RPC over HTTPS.  Whatever Apple (and Microsoft) did to enable push email certainly worked well! Perhaps a bit too well, though.  After using ActiveSync push for a few days, I noticed that my battery was draining by early afternoon.

At first, I chalked this up to increased usage of the phone’s new features.  But having spent the day (mostly) ignoring the phone while on vacation, I was shocked to see the battery icon turn red before dinner.  Clearly something was eating my battery alive!

As an experiment, I turned off push in the iPhone’s Settings pane, opting for manual just to be safe. Are you surprised to learn that my battery was green all the next day?  In fact, it barely used any power at all, even with 30-minute IMAP updates from Google Mail still running.

Note that the Push settings have been moved under “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” in OS 3.0.

Clearly ActiveSync push is a major battery hog, and I would imagine that 3G would be even worse than the miserly EDGE in the first-generation phone! What to do?  You’ve got just a few choices:

1. Go back to IMAP fetch and lose Exchange integration (boo!)
2. Leave push enabled but plan to charge up more often or use WiFi, which is much more battery-friendly.
3. Switch Exchange from push to fetch, which leaves the integration intact but doesn’t guzzle the juice as quickly
4. Switch Exchange to manual update, which is very battery-friendly

I have decided on option 3 when I’m out and about to conserve battery power, since most of my email can wait a few minutes.  And if I’m low on juice, I’ll switch over to option 4.  But if I’m in the office, with my most-excellent WiFi and broadband connectivity, I’m leaving push enabled.

I think it’s worth noting that the push settings are stored in a separate control panel from the other mail settings, which is either an odd gaffe or an indication that other non-mail push options will eventually be added here.

• There’s a master switch on the main panel (shown above) which is nice, since you can quickly turn off all push to conserve juice.
• I’d love another setting option of turning off push mail based on battery level or on a schedule, like the BlackBerry has.
• You can also tweak the master fetch schedule setting here.
• Tap Advanced, and you can set each account’s settings – select push, fetch, or manual for each account based on your own preferences.  If I was using MobileMe for personal email, I might be tempted to turn off push just for that account, since my spam can wait!
• One more thing – notice that you can set the name of your mail accounts to something other than your email address.  That’s done in each account’s settings panel.

Hopefully, these two suggestions will help the multitude of folks who are having problems with Exchange ActiveSync on the iPhone.  Drop me a line if I can be of more help!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | A Few iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Gotchas
This post was categorized as Apple, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

The answer to this question can vary greatly based on conditions, but it is always a solvable problem.  Email is a unique application, and is especially interesting when it comes to litigation and e-discovery, so creating a corporate policy for retention, and implementing it, is critical.  The quandry often boils down to a simple question: Is the email system a repository of business records or a temporal system for communication?  You would never implement a policy for retaining cardboard boxes or manilla folders, because you never know whether it contains an important memo (or a MacBook Air!)  But email could be considered the same way – it’s a mechanism not a data type!

Another key point is that IT often feels that it cannot unilaterally implement a retention policy without outside involvement.  This is true, to a point, but IT had better start the discussion, or they’ll be asked to implement an unreasonable (or technologically unfeasible) policy sooner or later.  Strange as it may sound, a policy that reflects the functionality of email archiving systems might be a good place to start, since this is all you can really implement anyway!

This topic is discussed in far more detail in my new whitepaper (sponsored by Symantec), How Long Should Email Be Saved? Download a copy from their web site to see more information about what a retention policy looks like, the impact of various laws and regulations, and how to get a retention project off the ground!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | How Long Should Companies Retain Email?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.