Smartphone ActiveSync

I had some problems getting ActiveSync to work with my new phone, the Audiovox SMT 5600. Then I had problems getting it to work securely. I’m happy to say that I’ve finally managed to get it all working.

My first problem was that I couldn’t get a connection to the server. We’re using Microsoft Windows SBS 2003, and as you may know it installs its own certificate based on the computer name. This isn’t so much a problem, but that computer name wasn’t available externally. What’s worse, I couldn’t get certificate services to install on the server. I’ll get back to that problem another day.

I managed to get things set correctly in the DNS, after numerous tries, so that the third-level domain would correctly resolve the host name at the fourth level of the server name (a.b.example.com). That means that I could actually connect to the appropriate server name in ActiveSync, instead of an alias. This eliminated one problem: Namely the dreaded Internet_55 error during sync, which appears to mean that there was a name mismatch on the certificate.

Sweet! I figured that all I needed to do next was turn on SSL and it would work. No such luck. Now I was hitting the Internet_45 error, which indicates that the certificate isn’t trusted. Easy enough, trust it. But how to make that happen?

Microsoft has two solutions. The first is to use a utility called DisableCertChk (why they can spell out “disable” but not “check” is beyond me) to deactivate the SSL checking during the ActiveSync process. This is great, but I can already do this on the phone. I tried anyway, and couldn’t get this application to run with SBS 2003. The search continues.

The second solution I found was to use another Microsoft utility called AddRootCert. The initial links I found did not include this descriptive page, so I tried over and over to get it to work. I kept getting a message that said SHCreateMenubar Failed. I’ve seen mentions that this means your version of the OS is too old, but in this case I think it is that the Smartphone operating system is different enough from the Pocket PC version that the widget just doesn’t exist.

Then I finally found the link above, and read the all-important text on that page. Namely that Pocket PC 2003 devices do NOT require a tool to install certificates.

The problem then became how to install the certificate. I had read some things that made it seem like just copying it and executing it would do the job, but I had to get it there first. So I used Internet Explorer to install the self-signed certificate on my desktop. I then used the Usercerts.msc management console (included with the AddRootCert package above) to export that certificate in DER-encoded binary X.509 format to a file with a .cer extension.

I then used ActiveSync to copy this file to my phone, and then using the file manager on the phone I selected the file and it installed it. Once the installation was done, I turned on the SSL option, verified that it worked and all was set. As a side note, once installed, you can delete the file containing the certificate from the phone – the import appears to update that information elsewhere on the phone, so the file is no longer needed.

I hope that this helps anyone else experiencing the same frustration.