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My organisation has many users (in the hundreds) with many email addresses that they can read (often as many as 10 per user) and can send from (for arguments sake, lets say half of those that they can read). And they want to access this from their mobile devices (Android, iOs, Blackberry, Windows Phone).

We have an IMAP server and SMTP server set up to serve them these messages, but it involves setting up an account on the device for each of the email addresses. This is often not something the users can do themselves, and given the numbers, not something that IT wants to do one at a time.

Is one of the following possible (and for which platforms)?

  • Configure these settings remotely
  • Generate a file containing the settings, that can be imported on the mobile device
Nameless One
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  • Since I am a new user, I don't know if this is too vague or too broad, so some moderation/editing may be needed. I am not sure if I should split this into one question per mobile operating system. – Nameless One Dec 30 '14 at 16:30

1 Answers1

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MDM is the technology that you're looking for. For each different mobile OS, you would need an MDM (Mobile Device Management) product that could perform this action. Not all MDM products will necessarily have the feature you're looking for, since we don't know what mail software or user directory platform you're using - for example, with Exchange integration, the MDM product usually needs to be able to query Exchange and AD. Some MDM products may support multiple platforms.

Obviously, IT (or someone with access rights to the MDM) will need to be noting the details for each device and user, and pre-populating the configs with each account.

mfinni
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  • There is additional rights management in the setup to that of AD and Exchange; and the IMAP server is not Exchange (although the SMTP server is). I was thinking that the ideal would be to generate settings from some .csv file specifying the accounts and server details. But your answer helps me to keep looking at least. – Nameless One Dec 30 '14 at 16:54
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    I'm not aware of any email application config on Android or iOS that works with importing a CSV - and if you ask your users to be doing that, you're going to be taking more support calls than you would want to. Again, an MDM product that meets your requirements is what you should be looking for. FYI, if you're only using Exchange for SMTP and not ActiveSync, then the product doesn't actually need any Exchange hooks. – mfinni Dec 30 '14 at 16:56