Automatically setup Exchange on Windows Mobile 6

Question

First of i know this question kind of both fitt this page and stackoverflow, but il post it here and if a moderator thinks otherwise please tell me il repost it ( If moving is not easy ).

My problem is this: We have many different windows mobile phones ( Mostly HTC ) and i need to setup the ability syncing email against our Exchange 2003 server ( In roaming mode , if that mathers ). Since we have many types of windows mobile phones it is annoying to have to dig in the menus to do this every time. So i was wondering is there a solution to do this automaticly?

Phones will be running either Windows mobile 6 or 6.1. If no solution to automaticly do this ( IE some sort of installer either from a windows machine or on the phone itself ) are the registry settings for setting up exchange easly documented?

At the end of the day the company is not that big, so i cannot invest unlimted amount of time into this either. Im fairly compitent in C# so any soltuion that involves code is fine

Answer 1

what you are looking for is called System Center Mobile Device Manager.

Answer 2

If you don't want to use (and pay for) SCMDM then you can build your own custom configs using the Configuration Service Provider interfaces - I've used these to configure a broad range of WinMo devices in the past with a single fairly lightweight app that builds the XML dynamically and then calls the relvant API - you can do this tethered using RAPICONFIG (part of the Windows Mobile SDK). For WinMo 5 and newer you will probably have to write a small wrapper app to allow provisioning, and for OEM\provider locked devices you will need some form of unlocker but XDADevelopers is your friend for all of this.

The newer OMA Provisioning stuff is much better but harder to implement, the older CSP XML's are simpler but more restricted. Despite that you can use them to set E-Mail accounts, sync preferences, WiFi profiles, Browser setup, Proxies, modify registry settings, security policies import certificates and a lot more. Best of all once you've made the changes you can lock them down and enforce local policies that only allow code signed by you to be installed\run in future.

Works for both SmartPhone (non touch screen) and Pro variants - although the security defaults on the SmartPhone class of devices are higher so it's a bit trickier.

Broadly speaking though - if you use these interfaces you will find that WinMo devices are very easy to work with in general than pretty much any other vendors offerings.

Answer 3

I was going to add this as a comment to the above answer but my reputation hasn't yet been established. SCMDM is neither easy nor cheap. For a small shop with limited resources, it's unlikely to be an appropriate solution.

For now, your best bet is to continue manual configuration. For hundreds of users (as opposed to many thousands), it will be cheaper and less time consuming to just do the configuration yourself rather than try to work with SCMDM.

Of course, if you are growing your Windows Mobile presence, SCMDM offers many additional features, such as transparent VPN, domain enrollment, and group policy management.

Answer 4

I don't know of any specific utility that already exists to do this. Unfortunately, most WinMo phones have elaborate changes to the UI and shell, even though they run the same host OS. This makes it difficult to streamline an install like you're asking.

Ultimately, you might look at something like Blackberry (most Blackberry Enterprise Servers can be subsidized through a telephony provider). The make deploying phones and email so easy it makes Windows Mobile look like an analog device.