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I’ve come across more than a couple of instances in the recent past (the most recent being prashanth) where people had trouble setting up Mail For Exchange (MFE) on their Nokia S60 devices.  So, I decided to do a step-by-step howto on how to get it installed, setup and running on your S60 phone.

I have used a Nokia 6210 Navigator (S60 FP2 device) for supporting this blog post, but any other S60 3rd edition / 5th edition device would conform to more or less the same process.  Now, here goes…

There are two ways you can start off your setup of MFE on your S60 device:

1. Hunt down the MFE icon hiding somewhere in the Installations / Applicaitons folder and start off the setup process…
2. Start setup from the Messaging app and move forward to install MFE and continue the setup.  We will be looking at this approach in the blog post.

The only difference between the two approaches is that in the first one already has MFE installed on your device and you just go ahead and type in your magic keywords and it just works!  In the second case, you type in the parameters and then it proceeds to install MFE (whose sis file Nokia has happily stored somewhere on your phone) and then apply the magic and get going!!!

So… starting with it…

1. Open the messaging app -> New mailbox.  Select Yes for the question it asks.
   
2. You should now be presented with the E-mail setup wizard.  Start it off… we’re just a few more steps away
   
3. The wizard will then show you a disclaimer.  Just accept it to move to the next step.  It will then check your GPRS (NOT WAP, GPRS = DATA = THE COSTLY WALA CONNEXUN ) connectivity to the internet and then the setup part of your process starts.
   
4. Continuing on… The next set of screens prompts you to enter the Email ID, password.
   
5. At this point, we’re halfway through the process.  The wizard will now show a list of protocols that are “possibly” supported by your email id.  One of them is POP3 / IMAP4 (which is the defacto thingy, but not what we’re interested in) and the other being, Mail For Exchange.  This is shown in the screenshots below:
   
6. Once MFE is selected, you will be presented with dialogues to enter your Windows Username and the Windows Domain Name against which you authenticate yourself in your organization.
   
7. In the next dialog, you have to enter your mail server URL.  This is the URL of the exchange server you have at work.
   
8. At this point, the installation of MFE starts on you system and proceeds to show you the Sync settings menu.
   
9. Pressing the center softkey on the Content synced settings item brings up the detailed settings for your MFE setup that you have done.  Here, you can tweak your Peak, off peak settings, Sync when roaming settings, and all the works…I’ll leave it to the screenshots below to do the explanations…
   
10. Once you are satisfied with the settings changes you have made to the profile, Select Options –> Full resync.  This will clear out any pre-existing sync data and refresh it with the latest data from the exchange server.
    
11. Once the Full sync is done, the MFE profile you just created gets saved and you can see the status of the sync process as it happens.
    
12. After closing the wizard, you must be able to see a Mail for Exchange folder in your Messaging application.  This indicates that you have an MFE profile setup on your phone.  Once the sync is complete from the previous step, you will see a new mail indication on the Home screen as indicated by a small ‘@’ icon in the top right near the battery indicator.
    

    You can haz push corporate emailz!!!

    

13. Another feature that MFE provides is the Company directory lookup.  This is basically the Addressbook feature that Outlook provides when you type the name of the recipient and press Ctrl + K.  The app is named Comp. Dir.
    

So there ends the step-by-step walkthrough for setting up MFE on your S60 devices.

Now comes the interesting part, Troubleshooting.

• If your sync has suddenly stopped working, chances are that your backend has cut you off for a while a.k.a. maintenance.
• Another common issue is the MFE not working after a FOTA upgrade.  This is rectified by deleting your existing MFE profile and creating a new one with the same settings.
• If your MFE setup keeps harping about the server being wrong (step 7 in how-to above), try it with the https://mail.yourmailserver.com url.

I hope this helps someone with regard to setting up MFE.  Until the next post… Chao!

Yesterday (Jun 3, 2009), I completed 4 years in the IT industry.  Its been a wonderful experience starting from TechMahindra (Erstwhile Mahindra British Telecom) back in June 2005 all the way to Sasken to Teleca and Nokia now in 2009.

This landmark achievement in my life definitely deserved a blog post… So here goes a list of experiences / learnings that I hold close to my heart and have mattered to me the most.  I’ve just jotted them down with out any structure / format blaming intensive lack of energy to sit and “compose” a blog post about my historic and memorable achievement:

The initial days in TechM as a fresher have been the most amazing days of my life till date. PERIOD.  Training, Practice, Tests, Training, Practice, Tests… In mellu speak, simbly oosssoome!!!

And when I look back at what I’ve done in the last 4 years, there are moments that give me a lot of pride and there are some where I’m going: “Dude!!! WTF!!! You god-freaking-seriously did that???” :-O .  But as I’m ME, I’m just gonna blame everything on fate and let the WTF moments pass and leave them for laughing at myself waaaay ahead in the future.

There is one important learning that I’ve kept steadfast and very close to my heart for all these 4 years… Something very simple, yet amazingly effective. And that is to NEVER SAY NO TO INFORMATION.  Of any kind…  A lot of people who know the cruisemaniac would agree to this…  I’m not talking about rule validation and sanity testing here… I’m just talking core-dump!

That was something I learnt from my first ever PM at TechMahindra.  Keep searching, keep learning, and it will all come back and help you one day.  I’m still waiting for that “One day” though!

Coming to the next learning, I’ve learnt to fight where its necessary and be subduinng where necessary.  People skills play a huuuge part in corporate life.  Being frank may first offend people… but it sure helps in the long run.  If i can commit to a deadline, i commit whole-heartedly.  If I cannot, I make sure my seniors know that I cannot!

Which brings me to the next very important gospel…  EMail is for record keeping! Not only for fooling around with silly forwards!  I’ve learnt not to take work from my managers unless the specs of what I have to do are written in an Email and sent to me!  Lets face it… IT takes its toll on everyone… All of us want the short way out… But remember, the short-cut always fucks you up! ALWAYS!

Next up, Always experiment… I’ve always wanted to figure out things on my own…  Make mistakes and fuck things up… thats how you learn! Atleast, thats how I learn…  I’m sure this mentality has brought me a full circle in Symbian.  Starting off from Apps, I went down to the Subsystems and Frameworks, dirtied my hands on multimedia engineering, user interfaces, Platform support and Integration, and currently handle Build and Release Process management, whoa!!! That felt good when I typed it in!   The crux, its there for the taking… Go Ask… Show interest, show commitment, it has happend for ME! It can happen for you!

Shifting jobs is not a bad thing!  You get another chance to make a different set of mistakes in the name of work! That has helped me tell my managers upfront what I’ve done and what my goals are… It gives people a window to fit you in and experiment…

And of course… the last but not the least part: Its a totally unrewarding rat-race… you win some, you lose some… keep your spirits up and keep running.  Rat or not, it doesnt really matter!  You’re in it for the money and the perks… Figure out your path, and walk it!
<<<Something more must come here>>>

<<<apparently it wont>>>

Chao…

A lot of people down here in India did not even know of the Security flaw in Nokia devices in all probability.  The company called F-Secure, that makes Antivirus software for Symbian phones had demonstrated an SMS based flaw during in Nokia’s devices during the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.  You can read about it here, here and see a video of this exploit in action here.

The flaw, named “Curse of Silence” was demonstrated on Nokia’s Series60 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition phones (FP1 included).  It worked this way: People sent a carefully and very very painstakingly typed series of messages to an E-Series / N-Series phone.  And voila, the affected device would stop communicating  with the outside world using SMS.  You could only make / receive voice calls.  And the only known way out for this hack was to hard reset the phone.

What happened as a result of this was the noise in the Nokia forums, which obviously happens…  And then, F-Secure chose to act.  They released a patch for the flaw saying that they could protect the devices if users agreed to shell out 60$ USD for it.  Crazy!

And then the noise level in the forums grew even further, and people started to blast Nokia for making such a mistake in their production devices and then Nokia chose to act.  They just released a free application download which would clean up your phone if your device is infected. And keep you secure.  This also probably answers the various firmware upgrades Nokia has been pushing out for most of its models lately.

What I particularly wanted to point out with this post are the following:

1. The fact that Nokia actually listens to its users.  The security flaw is not major.  If you take a look at the video from the link posted above, it shows how strenuous it is to actually hack into the system.
2. People will always complain.  Listening to the complaints and having to put up with all that noise AND take what is important for both an organization and its customers (loyal and otherwise) is real mastery!
3. It shows one straight thing from the management perspective: You may have the first mover advantage for a situation.  But, when the playground is not yours, you dont get to play according to your rules. F – Secure!
4. F-Secure sucks!!! Nokia needs to stop teaming up with F-Secure and stop listing them in their Download! application.
5. Nokia rocks!
6. Nokia rocks! and, lastly
7. Nokia rocks!!!

So yeah, all is well in the Nokia and Symbian and Smartphones world!   You can continue to send out confidential mail, love-ka-mail and all other sorts of yeee-mail… and listen to “?? ?????? ?? ???? ???…” or any other song of your choice on your cool Nokia phone while getting traffucked in any city that you are in.

But do remember, you do need to periodically backup your phone.  There is the software part that Nokia and its team of hard-working, dedicated, engineers can take care of… And there’s the “idiot using the box” that you can choose / not choose to be.

And, in other unrelated news, Apple’s multitouch patent got through…  I feel really sorry for the Palm-Pre!!! They need some really awesome magic from the Harry Potter world to rewire the stuff!

Last, but definitely not the least, thanks to Ricky Cadden of SymbianGuru for the update / info.

There! Another lovely blog post done!

Im back to writing on the blog after quite some time…  Things at work have kept me quite busy!!! And as 2008 draws to a final closure, I thought I’d write up a post on the yearly roundup… Something that I missed last year for reasons that I’ll mention below…  So yeah, here goes nothing:

2008 started with a dark note this time around for me with Mom being admitted to hospital for a Bypass surgery.  The surgery was succesful, mom started recovering her health and January went by quite fast… and then hell broke loose!!!

On the afternoon of February 2nd, mom left us all!!! A shock that none of us was prepared to take! So there went February 2008, down the frigging drain!!!

March and April went by pretty dullish… Nothing interesting in life… Except to mention that I was no longer associated with Nisarga from that point on…  I dint see the same commitment levels coming out of me…  I dint see any point in anything else in life at that moment.

Life did a steady climb from May onwards, when I was asked to travel to Turin, Italy for 3 months.  Lovely trip, amazing places, awesome beaches, serene hills and fields… That was the best 3-month-period of this year.  Met some lovely people in life! Had some of the best Tiramisu and pizza in my life.

Back to India in August, Sasken started dipping down the scales… Motorola was dying… things in my life were however moving good… Got to work on the Media player for Motorola’s Symbian series of phones.  The sad truth however is that not one of the devices I worked on lived long enough to hit the market!

And then on the 1st of October, Teleca happened.  They were opening their operations in India and wanted Symbian developers! Took an interview, got whooopped!! and was offerred a job there… Lovely salary… and most important of all, the power and responsibility to create the India team!!! Joined Teleca on the 10th of November and things have been great since then!!! I am finally going to be able to realise my dream of working on a Nokia phone!!! Double w00t for me

So yeah, Things rolling good after a very very bumpy and rough ride!!! As 2008 draws to a close, heres a list of highlights in life in the year:

1. Saw a live football match for the first time in life!!! Juventus vs. Inter Vs. Milan @ the swanky new stadium in Turin.
2. Learnt italian!!! Personal best for me! Proves that I’m still wired tight and right!
3. Got promoted at work. Yippeeeeeeeeee!!!! I is Senior Engineer now B-)
4. Shifted to Jayanagar from CV Raman nagar.  I now have a crowd at home… Its back to living with a group
5. Bought a 500 gig hard-disk and managed to fill it up to its brim!  Im now busy trimming it down!
6. Got myself an eee-PC – I picked up the eee-PC from jace at BCB7 for an undisclosed sum .  Good company… Ultra lightweight stuff!!! Totally awesome thingy thats running a fullblown Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) distro right now…
7. Got myself an iPod nano – Finally into the apple family… I would never pick up anything more than this from the apple family!!!  49 grams of uber-ultra-light-weight goodness!!!
8. Did a bike trip to Ooty with scorpion032 a.k.a. Laxman Prasad and swaroopch a.k.a. well… Swaroop. C. H.
9. Travelled to Nandi hills on bike again!!! With my roomies…
10. Got a new job… Got more responsibility and got to meet some uber l33t peeps @ work!!!
11. Managed to do a looooooot of reading!!! and a lot of listening to music!!!

Pretty positive outlook I have eh??? Well life rocks… thats the rule… and we live on to die another day…

There goes the post for the past year!!! Lots of new things learnt… lots of pain felt… lots of love lost… and lots more of love gained…

I guess this is what is called a roller coaster ride…

Chao… and Wish you all a very very happy and prosperous new year!!! Have truck-loads of fun…  If life’s giving you the kicks, take it, and enjoy it all…

The big guy there is opening up the curtains very very soon… 56 hours, 20 minutes to go and counting down as I type in this post!!! Is this the sweet N82??? Or is it some new new thingy???

2 more days to go for another biggie in the phone industry eh???

Engedget has the coverage of the news here…

Tags: Series60, Symbian, Engadget, NSeries, Nokia