Apple iPhone with SBS Exchange 2003

I recently encountered an issue getting an IPhone 3gs to receive push email from a SBS 2003 Exchange server.

Having read many article, let me say that this IS POSSIBLE. There are a lot of posts out there that say:

  • You can’t do it with Exchange 2003 you need Exchange 2007 or 2010
  • You need to use IMAP
  • You need ISA server in the middle

These are incorrect.

The customer has a fairly standard Single SBS 2003 box with exchange all on the one server, running SP2 and Outlook over RPC/Outlook anywhere fully working – a typical setup for a small company.

The key problem I discovered was that OMA (Outlook Mobile Access) is required for by the iPhone to synchronize with Exchange. To enable this:

  • Open the Default Website in IIS 6
  • Disable the IP address restrictions on the exchange-oma directory
  • Restart IIS (iisreset)

Once done the iPhone email synchronization started working fine.

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