Some users in our organisation had purchased Blackberries from their favourite mobile phone retailers, with the expectation of them working with our Exchange email. Being retail BB's, they would not provisioned or licensed for our BES server, meaning we would not be able to remote wipe or do other useful stuff for them. Blackberry do allow connectivity to Exchange via OWA as per articles here, but some users were not able to get their work email configured because of the following error:
Cannot connect to email server or invalid server name.
Please verify the Outlook Web Access URL.
If the error persists contact yourdomain.com (your email provider).
The fields available for user input were:
- Email address:
- Password:
- Web access URL
- Username
- Mailbox Name
After some experimintation I discovered the working combination.
- Web Access URL had to include the /exchange at the end, e.g: https://your.owa.com/exchange
- Username had to be in the domain\username format
- Mailbox name had to be the first part of the email address, i.e everything before the @ sign.
It was the mailbox name that took some guesswork. In a lot of organisations the 'mailbox name' would be the same as the username, but in our organisation we use a 6 digit number for usernames so the usual guessable combo was different. I wonder why this works though or why 'mailbox name' is even required. Seems a bit odd as it's not required by any other smartphone I've configured for ActiveSync.
