Had some problems with the time change here at work, seems that most websites left out a very important detail as to what gets upgraded, what order, and how so when using mobile services with Microsoft Exchange.

The devices that I am dealing with are the:

Palm Treo with GoodLink
Blackberry Devices with Enterprise Management

Running on these servers, you should also have the Microsoft Exchange Management Tools. I could find no place that mentioned these tools, after they have been installed, they are virtually untouched. You have to upgrade the installed tools to the same version as the Exchange server itself, then Install the CDO patch against the TOOLS. All of the sites that I have found, talk about applying the CDO patch to the Exchange server itself.

Links: Exchange 2003 Service Pack 1
Links: Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2

Here is the problem I was having…

If you create an appointment from 1:00PM to 2:00PM (or other times, this is just an example) using Outlook from your client, the appointment times are correct, even on the device it says 1:00 to 2:00. But, if you create an appointment using the mobile device, say at 2:00 to 3:00, and then look inside outlook, the appointment will say 3:00 to 4:00, which as you just created the appointment, already know this is incorrect.

All of our mobile devices experienced this problem. GoodLink Palms, and Blackberry Devices. After installing the Exchange SP2 upgrade on the server not even running Exchange, and then the CDO patch on top of that, these problems went away.

Before we begin, make sure the phone has a data plan activated and that you can browse the internet using Internet Explorer on the phone.

If your Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server is using Forms Based Authentication, and you are using SSL with the forms based (You SHOULD WHY ARE YOU NOT USING SSL!!!?) then you will need to either get a certificate from a 3rd party that is trusted by the device, or you will need to transfer the certificate authority’s root certificate to the phone and integrate it with the Windows OS on the phone.

Because we are cheap, we are going to use our own certificate and save ~$60.00 a month.

You will need to use Internet Explorer and web browse to your Certificate Server on your network. Usually it will be something like, http://adserver/certsrv replace http with https if you use SSL on that server (You should be anyway.) and replace adserver with the name of the server running IIS and Certificate Services.

At the bottom of the webpage, click on Download a CA certificate, certificate chain, or CRL. After the next page loads, click on Download CA certificate at the bottom. You will be presented with a file download dialog, save the file where you can find it later.

Close Internet Explorer and then plug in the MDA Phone into your computer with the USB cable. Make sure you have ActiveSync installed from Microsoft. Navigate to the My Computer, and you should have a new device called ‘Mobile Device’ or something similar. Nice big orange thing.

Copy the certificate into that device, under the My Documents folder on the device. Then on the device itself, use the File Explorer to find the certificate file, and click on it and choose Yes to import the certificate.

Now you can proceed to setting up ActiveSync on the phone device itself to connect to your Microsoft Exchange 2003 server.