Rules For Exhange Push E-Mail

[Brad Adrian]

I was really glad to learn that my employer would break out of the "Blackberry-is-god" mindset and make pushed Exchange e-mail available to Windows Mobile users, and I was willing (if not slightly grudgingly) to accept the security rules/settings that are also automatically pushed to my device. I don't LIKE entering a lengthy alpha-numeric-upper-and-lower-case password every time my device goes unused for more than ten minutes, but I figure that's a small price to pay for the convenience of receiving the e-mail messages and appointment requests that arrive when I'm away from my PC.

For some goofy reason, though, our IT gurus thought it'd be a good idea to also enforce a ten-second timeout on the device's backlight. That means that I have to either wiggle around on my 8125's cursor keys the whole time I'm trying to do or read anything OR manually reset the timeout settings after each time the device automatically locks itself.

I obviously don't want to circumvent any of the "real" security settings that my employer feels are important, but can anybody think of a way to configure a longer backlight timeout that does NOT have to be manually changed every time I unlock my device? Are there any registry setting tweaks than can accomplish this or any tricks using third-party apps like Tweaks2K2? I guess there may be some kind of "stay-awake" applets that would keep the device from automatically locking after ten minutes of inactivity, but that does kinda defeat the purpose of security settings in the first place.

Thanks. Any ideas are welcome, because as much as I love push e-mail, I honestly can't see continuing to use it if I have to manually reconfigure my backlight settings a dozen times a day.

[Brad Adrian]

I was really glad to learn that my employer would break out of the "Blackberry-is-god" mindset and make pushed Exchange e-mail available to Windows Mobile users, and I was willing (if not slightly grudgingly) to accept the security rules/settings that are also automatically pushed to my device. I don't LIKE entering a lengthy alpha-numeric-upper-and-lower-case password every time my device goes unused for more than ten minutes, but I figure that's a small price to pay for the convenience of receiving the e-mail messages and appointment requests that arrive when I'm away from my PC.

For some goofy reason, though, our IT gurus thought it'd be a good idea to also enforce a ten-second timeout on the device's backlight. That means that I have to either wiggle around on my 8125's cursor keys the whole time I'm trying to do or read anything OR manually reset the timeout settings after each time the device automatically locks itself.

I obviously don't want to circumvent any of the "real" security settings that my employer feels are important, but can anybody think of a way to configure a longer backlight timeout that does NOT have to be manually changed every time I unlock my device? Are there any registry setting tweaks than can accomplish this or any tricks using third-party apps like Tweaks2K2? I guess there may be some kind of "stay-awake" applets that would keep the device from automatically locking after ten minutes of inactivity, but that does kinda defeat the purpose of security settings in the first place.

Thanks. Any ideas are welcome, because as much as I love push e-mail, I honestly can't see continuing to use it if I have to manually reconfigure my backlight settings a dozen times a day.

[martin_ayton]

Brad,

This is kind of interesting because my Hermes (running WM5), without any intervention from my employer, will not sustain a backlight time-out setting of anything except 10 seconds. I can set it to whatever else I like and it reverts to the 10 second setting almost immediately. I had some discussion a while back with some folks over at Xda-Developers who have the same problem and we were unable to locate the cause or solve it directly.

However, if I simply disable the backlight time-out completely, that seems to stick. It isn't a battery killer either because the device power-off timer works fine and that remains user-configurable.

It would be interesting to see if disabling the backlight time-out would work for you, because it would imply that it isn't your IT department that is causing the problem, but some oddity of the OS. It might also give us a clue as to where to look to fix the underlying problem.

Cheers,

Martin.

[Jon Westfall]

Yea, looks like a Hermes specific problem. I don't know of any device controls that allow administrators to easily specify this timeout (They'd have to push registry changes down to the device, they can't do it through a mobile security policy on the exchange box). And since it looks like changing the timeout doesn't work on the Hermes, then I think it's just a hermes oddity.