DexterPOSH's Blog

This is the third post in series of poking around EAS protocol using PowerShell, find the first 2 posts below : PowerShell + EAS : Getting Started PowerShell + EAS + MSExchange : Autodiscovery If you are a interested in looking at the C# code samples then checkout posts  @MobilityDojo.net in the Resources section at the bottom. Once you have discovered the URL of the EAS endpoint to connect to, it is time to follow below 3 requests in order to establish an ActiveSync Partnership with Exchange Server:

This post is going to be on how to use PowerShell to get an insight in the Autodiscovery process which the EAS Mail clients use. Second entry in my #PowerShell + #EAS posts: PowerShell + EAS : Getting Started Once you enter Email Address and Password in the Mail setup in the device, the Autodiscovery process kicks in. Remember there is no such thing as the mail account getting magically configured :) To explain the process is not my intent, Please refer to the MSDN blog post here . In short the Autodiscovery process tries to get a valid XML response from 4 sources (based on the workflow explained at the MSDN blog ). In this post we will be looking at a way to make those 4 requests and study the responses we get back using PowerShell. This is a more of a hands on approach here. I will be taking an account for the demo, for which we will see the discovery process in action : TestUser Account on Office365   (testuser@dexterposh.in) The EAS clien...

This is the first post on a series of blog posts concentrated around understanding Exchange ActiveSync Protocol as this is the underlying protocol which Mobile devices use in order to connect to the Exchange Server. The whole idea is to be able to craft EAS requests and parse the Server responses using PowerShell in order to understand the protocol better. Hint - Take a look at the cmdlet Invoke-WebRequest, it will be used to craft the Web requests later on. Why I want to do this ? Because when you start poking around you learn the Product better :). This is a getting started post and I am following and porting most of the code already written in C# at MobilityDojo.net  to PowerShell. This post is about giving you a hang of how to make Web Requests to an Exchange Server's EAS endpoint and parse them to get insight in the process. Now if you setup mail for a User in a Mobile device and use Fiddler as reverse proxy to analyze the communication , you will see the belo...

Many of the Exchange Admins might already be familiar with the dreaded checkbox of doom , which causes issues with move request and Mobile devices. Post by MVP Tony Redmond here  explains this in detail. Scenario & the Problem at hand : When a User connects to the Exchange Server using his Mobile device, then after the authentication the Exchange Trusted Subsystem creates  msExchActiveSyncDevices Objects for the User. This will be evident from the below screenshot for one of the User in ADSI edit. Now what if the Exchange Trusted Subsystem doesn't have permissions on the AD User to create those Objects , all hell is let loose. This was the case I was tackling recently and searching each User in the Directory which had this checkbox of doom unchecked manually is not feasible (am lazy).

As already mentioned in my previous post , I now have a test Exchange 2010 Server running on Azure . Now working in Mobile Device & Email Management space, my mobile devices needed to eventually connect to my Email Infrastructure to try out few scenarios. Initially I thought that opening the https endpoint and enabling ActiveSync (for the Mailbox User) would suffice, but I was wrong. Needed to make few changes to the SSL bindings on the IIS and trust the certificate used for the same. Let's get to it then. When we create a new VM on Azure it gets the Certificate for the cloud service added to the machine's personal Cert store. Below is a screenshot showing the same : Now as mentioned in my previous post Exchange by default will create a self signed Certificate and bind it to the CAS Server for https communication.