Managing Mobile Devices....

Another question from a customer --

Do you have any info on locking a Mobile 5 device? Particularly the web access capabilities so that the client cannot access any web sites outside of the corporate network. Basically, protection against virus’s or infected attachments getting onto the device.

If this device is synching to an Exchange server, then whatever Exchange is configured to do for anti-spam, anti-malware, anti-virus applies to the mobile device. Since you are synching data that is already placed in the mailbox, anything preventative measures Exchange is configured to do will help protect the mobile device.

As for web-surfing, there is a little in the way of simple policy management at this time for Mobile devices. The big stumbling block here is that mobile devices don't authenticate against your domain so they don't get Group Policy applied to them. If you have a Windows Mobile 5 device that has the Message Security and Feature Pack installed or a Windows Mobile 6 device, Exchange 2003 SP2 and Exchange 2007 allow you to do some basic policy management. You will see additional improvements in this for Exchange 2007 SP1 which does add some features but nothing that allows for configuring what web sites a mobile device can or cannot access. 

You can read about some of the policy updates here –

New Client Access Features in Exchange 2007 SP1

If you want to read about all of the new features in Exchange 2007 SP1, check out this link –

What’s New in Exchange 2007 SP1

Cheers!