Steve Dolphin

Apple iPhones and MDaemon E-Mail Server: Enterprise Rollout with SyncML?

MDaemon is an email server which for a while has been actively competing with Microsoft Exchange, where Exchange has a slight advantage in my opinion is with its widespread adoption into the rapidly expanding and feature-rich “smartphones in the enterprise” arena.

As blogged back in 2008 here: http://www.everything-mdaemon.com/category/mdaemon/syncml-mdaemon there are indeed some ways around this, and things are even a little better than they were then. Previously if you wanted to use your iPhone with your MDaemon server then you would have to:

• Cope without any real enterprise-level management
• Not have any mobile security options such as tracking or remote wiping
• Not have any calendar or contacts information, e-mail only via IMAP (unless you tried to use the badly reviewed funambol or the better, but previously painful-to-use, Sythensis ToDo+Cal apps

Now, for the best part Apple have done an excellent job of making things better, for a start, with the introduction of iOS4 they’ve introduced multitasking, which made everything so much better because it meant that you could leave your third party calendar app open in the background so that reminders came up, bonus! (Previously this required a complicated export-to-.ics-and-read-back-into-the-iPhones-calendar-just-to-make-reminders-work game).

Apple have now additionally allowed access to the calendar on the iPhone in its entirity, which means you can do away with the third party calendar apps all together and just worry about syncronisation – so far only one app appears to have risen to this charming development: Synthesis SyncML Pro this app, and the still-available Synthesis ToDo+Cal app are now developed by http://www.plan44.ch).

Of course Apple also now let us use the “iPhone Configuration Tool” which is quite handy, it allows you to pre-configure as many profiles as you like (I configure each phone with a baseline of “corporate” settings and then an individual one with e-mail account details etc, so two in total) for each phone you plug in, it’s really good but it is currently missing some helpful features such as the inability to add and lock a mobile me account for corporate seek-and-rescue requirements.

iPhone Configuration Tool

On which note, now that Find My iPhone has been made free for iOS4 devices there’s now a way to track and remote wipe handsets, although this is a cumbersome one-at-a-time process when initially setting up.

So in short if you have MDaemon and you want to roll out iPhones I would suggest:

1. Use the enterprise iPhone Configuration Tool from Apple to make two profiles: one containing company policies like password requirements; one containing individual settings like e-mail accounts
2. Use Synthesis SyncML Pro for Calendar and Contact synchronisation from MDaemon
3. Setup Apple’s Find My iPhone for each iPhone you deploy (assuming iPhone 4+)

Each phone will need a bit of manual configuration such as changing the IMAP Sent Items / Deleted Items folders; throwing in the usernames and passwords for MDaemon for Synthesis to work; and manually adding the MobileMe account information for Find My iPhone, but ultimately you’ll have a tidy enough working solution that certainly beats having to force iPhone users to load up a web page and visit webmail (WorldClient) when they want to check their calendar.