Thursday, June 18, 2009

Shared Calendars with the iPhone

Yes it can be done, even if you already have an Exchange account setup on your iPhone. This pertains to iPhone users who are already connecting to their company's exchange server, and if you're doing that, I'm sure you're aware of the calendar sharing features of Outlook and Exchange. The problem is that your iPhone (or even ActiveSync) will only sync your personal folders. A shared calendar would be a public folder and therefore will not sync. I've tried using other services such as Google Calendar. The problem here is that when you configure your iPhone to sync with Google Calendar you must set it up as an Exchange account. RIGHT! YOU CAN ONLY HAVE 1 EXCHANGE ACCOUNT ON THE IPHONE!!! Here is the workaround. (Before I get started I'm going to assume you can get around Microsoft Outlook fairly well and have working knowledge of Sharepoint and Exchange features.) Go to http://www.icalx.com/ and create an account. (It's free.) After you make the account you can click on the "account" link and it will give you the proper URL's for posting calendar data. There will both public and private URL's and the only difference between the 2 is that "private" will make you enter a username and password. I used "private" and had success. Next, locate your public calendar in Outlook and right-click on it. Click "Publish to Internet." Click "Publish to WebDAV server." Enter all of the information given to you on the pages from icalx.com. Here you can give your credentials as well as how often you want it published. Now for setting up the iPhone. Back to the account page on icalx. Once you have published your calendar, you will see the filename of it on the account page. On the iPhone, go into "settings" - "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" - "Add Account" - "Other" - "Add Subscribed Calendar." In the server field enter your icalx URL follwed by the .ics filename. EX: http://icalx.com/private/accountname/calendar.ics. You have just worked around an issue that is bugging thousands of people. I'll leave the finer details and tweaking to you.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

SBS 2008 POP3 Connector

Are you wondering why your SBS 2008 server is not recieving emails larger than 10mb or so over your wonderful POP3 connector? You know, the POP3 connector you're using becuase you're too scared or lazy to host your own email? Have you looked everywhere for the setting that dictates the message size limit? Have you even verified your settings using the commands in the Exchange Shell? Have you looked EVERYWHERE!? I bet you haven't. You haven't looked at your fax connector for Sharepoint. Why would you look there? I dunno. Maybe because you're not worried about FAXES! Well...the folks at Microsoft do not know your pain and don't care. Go change the size limit of incoming faxes under that connector and flex your muscles and be a god as you have now fixed the problem. Set it to 500mb if you want. Who cares? We'll talk about moving your Exchange database to a larger disk later on.

*Ryan*

Intro

Hi. My name is Ryan. Welcome to my blog. Here you will find all sorts of material including, but not limited to: rants, raves, anguish, humor, advice, and an occasional how-to.

All incidents you will read about here are entirely true but names will be substituted to protect....well....myself and my company. Speaking of my company, I own an I.T. services company somewhere in the United States. Well...at least that's the glorified description of it. Actually, if it involves a keyboard and a monitor we will provide support for it. Or try to sell you one. We try very hard. Unfortunately we also handle P.C. sales and service. We have also been blessed with providing helpdesk support for a VERY small software company with limited coding skills, which is more skill than I have when it comes to coding. Speaking of VERY small, so is my company, consisting of a crew of uh.....let's just say single digits here.

Make yourself comfy and enjoy my posts. If you find any typos, spelling errors, or grammatical errors, please feel free to print these pages out and swallow them. I hope you can take something from this blog that will help you out in your own unfulfilling journey through I.T. and P.C. support hell. By all means, if you find anything here that is technically incorrect or would like to add to, feel free to message me. If you don't find an answer to something here but think I may be able to help, message me.

Here are some of my specialties,

**Microsoft Terminal Services**
Small Business Server
Active Directory (there's more to it than user accounts)
General Microsoft Server Technologies
VPN
TCP/IP
P.C. and server hardware
A/V
MIDI guitar equipment
Coffee makers
Chainsaws

*Ryan*