Exchange Session Failed Communication Interrupted

Yesterday I went ahead and bought the new Sony Ericsson z770i that I blogged about some time ago. I have been waiting a few weeks to get it in black instead of silver and during that time they announced another model – z780i – that should be all that the z770i is but also with a built in GPS. It seems there is always another model being announced, so even if I would have preferred the z780i I wasn’t prepared to wait any longer. I also hear that it will not be sold on the Swedish market for some reason (maybe because they just started shipping the z770)

Last night after I put the children to bed I played around with it and tried to get ActiveSync to work. I filled out the info in the Synchronization settings and connected but only got “Exchange Session failed Communication interrupted” (or since I have Swedish selected as language: “Exchange Sessionen misslyckades Kommunikationen avbröts”)

I searched the Sony Ericsson Support Knowledge base – not a single hit for neither Exchange, ActiveSync nor Active Sync! 🙁

Thanks to Google and this thread by dmwood at Microsoft Technet, Goran at my Hosted Exchange 2007 provider managed to solve this for me late last night. In my Hosted Exchange Control Panel the ActiveSync Policey “Allow Non-provisionable devices” was unchecked. Once Goran checked that option for me everything started to work. Thanks Goran for working late and helping me out!

I also sent an email to Sony Ericsson support and this is their reply this morning:

Confirm with your IT staff that device security settings on the server allow access to devices that do not fully support password settings. This option is available in:

Exchange System Manager > Global Settings > Mobile Services > Device Security

If this checkbox was unchecked, you will get a connection failed, although a Windows Mobile device would still sync properly.

The following security settings are supported:
Wipe: PIM data and settings are supported.
Exchange 2003 Device security Settings: NOT supported.
Exchange 2007 Additional Security settings: NOT supported.

I will probably get back with a post on the differences between using Windows Mobile ActiveSync and non-Windows Moible/Sony Ericsson ActiveSync, there are a few.

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