Mac IT Guy: Access Exchange from home

25.01.2011
I use Mail.app at home for both my home and work e-mail (Mobile Me and Microsoft Exchange 2003 respectively). For a while, it worked great. Then all of a sudden I couldn't send messages from the work e-mail account--I could receive, but I couldn't send; the Mobile Me account continued to work just fine, in both directions. When I asked my IT department, I was told there had been a problem with one of the Exchange servers and that it had to be reset or replaced. But they also said that that should not have affected me. They suggested that I recheck the account from an iPhone. Of course, the iPhone worked perfectly. But that doesn't help Mail on my home Mac or my work laptop. One funny thing: When I bring the laptop to work and connect wirelessly there, I can send, without changing its settings. One other thing that might be helpful: To connect the iPhone to the Exchange server, we use a Webmail server. The IT department has given up at this point. Can you help?

The things you point out, like the fact that "it works from the internal WiFi", tell me that your IT folks may not have made sure that SMTP is visible from the outside world. Using Outlook Web Access (OWA) on the iPhone is absolutely nothing like using SMTP from another mail client, so the fact that they can get to a Webmail page is of no use whatsoever in connecting to Exchange via SMTP from the outside world. Also, checking the SMTP settings with an iPhone will work only if the iPhone is using SMTP and not Exchange ActiveSync (EAS).

Without knowing how your iPhone is set up, there's almost no way to tell if that's really a valid test. However, there are a few things I'd check with your IT people:

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Our campus has switched almost completely to dual-boot Macs. We're looking for the best way to manage these machines in an Active Directory-based environment. Right now, we manage deployment and imaging with DeployStudio running on a late-model Xserve; we then manage the Macs via Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) or direct interaction (with directory binds via the Snow Leopard Active Directory plugin). I know we could use dual-directory Active Directory/Open Directory for management. But what are the pros and cons of other possibilities--Active Directory schema extension, Centrify, LANrev, JSS, and so on? We need a way to gather master images, deploy them to many machines, and then (ideally) apply policies to those machines throughout their service life.

Wow, that's a lot of questions in a small space, but the gist is: how do I integrate Macs into an Active Directory (AD) environment beyond basic authentication?