Friday, December 11, 2015

New Mobility issues with iOS 9.x Devices

Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync with Apple iOS devices are not a good combination till date and still end up with new issues overtime. We all know that they both have a long history on this topic. Even with the new iOS 9.x release few issues reported globally with EAS and Microsoft team has updated their Current issues article to reflect this.


Below are the two key issues:

The organizer of a meeting receives multiple responses from an attendee

Attendees receive a meeting update after the event reminder is triggered

Once an issue becomes a known issue, Microsoft support will point you to the above said articles, but convincing our users to accept this is still painful. Though we educate them to accept or update meetings only from their outlook client as a best practice, most of them are mobile users and this is not much ideal in today's World. So they finally end up creating new issues, which results in more support cases to either Corporate IT or Microsoft support teams.

After the release of new Microsoft Outlook for iOS, Microsoft Support team is giving this a workaround till they resolve the actual issue.

List of fixes provided with every iOS 9.x  can be found here: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1842?locale=en_US

Noting seems straight forward for the above said issues in the current update and still we need to wait for these to get addressed with the next build from Apple and also from Microsoft side, if a fix needs to be applied on their end.

Now, not only our EAS is impacted, one more new issue has hit the MDM Space with these new iOS devices

Most Organizations utilize either EAS or MDM for managing their mobile users, With the latest innovations and threats in today's mobile world, most Organizations are using a strong MDM solution to manage their mobility workforce to ensure that their corporate data is Secure. Creates polices for the devices that are accessing the corporate resources from anywhere in the world and make them compliant inline with their IS policy and manage them effectively.

If you are utilizing Microsoft Intune as your MDM solution and your users are using iOS 9.2 devices then you are hit by the new issue explained in the below Intune Blog post,

Review here: Important: Issue with iOS 9.2 release

Also the article states that this issue is affecting other MDM providers too and they are working with Apple support to address this issue.

Defer upgrading to iOS 9.2 for managed devices is provided as the current workaround.

Fixing these issues is always painful, because if we upgrade to a new iOS version for addressing an existing issue, it breaks the other working services and creates a new one.

Ensure that your users are made aware about these current issues periodically and educate them not to flood your IT support team with these known issues, reducing these cases creates a better support experience to handle other issues inside your environment timely.

Update:

Status Update: Issue Resolved, advise your end-users to upgrade to iOS 9.2.1 (as of January 19, 2016)

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