Businesses that use Apple’s iPhone are warned they might encounter trouble with their exchange servers once updating their iPhone’s to the latest iOS4.0 operating system.
Initially it was noticed that after applying the iPhone update, many users encountered sync problems when syncing their Google accounts including Gmail and Google Calender through the exchange sync functionality. Google reported that the rush of traffic triggered by the swarm of iPhone iOS 4 users syncing their data has spiked their load and created problems, however it now appears as though the problem runs deeper and is causing headaches for businesses running Microsoft Exchange servers with iPhone’s syncing using the ActiveSync feature.
“The problem is that iOS4 increases the times that iPhones or iPod touches try to connect to the Exchange server. Devices running iOS4 will timeout, drop sync to Microsoft Exchange, then try to reconnect every 30 seconds or so without tearing down the original network connection to the servers they way every other device will do when connecting to Exchange.” Says Geardiary.
The problem extends beyond just iPhone users on your exchange server, as the problem overloads the connections to the exchange server and creates problems for all users syncing their mobiles (whether using Windows Mobile, webOS, Symbian or Android) to your corporate email server.
There is a fix to the iPhone iOS4.0 ActiveSync exchange server problem, however Apple very quietly slipped the fix out, which can be found here. In order to fix the problem of iOS4.0 iPhone’s crashing your exchange server you will need to apply the fix to each iPhone individually as there is yet no way to manage the deployment of the fix across all the phones deployed by your business.
The fix extends the timeout for the iPhone when syncing to the exchange server, this results in less abandoned connection attempts and should avert the exchange syncing issue.
