Easy(er) iPhone to UW Connection?

Tale of Two Configs

It was the best of times, it was the worst of …. Apologies to all the Dickens fans out there, but the beginning to the classic tale has a number of parallels to some people experience with configuring the iPhone to connect to UW services. It is the best of times in that it is easy to connect to the UW wifi, email (Exchange, Deskmail/IMAP, Gmail, etc) and the m.UW or OneBusAway apps. It is the worst (ok, not best) of times in that you need to configure all of this manually. Each one isn’t difficult, but you need to find the documentation and navigate through a lot of choices.

Enter the Configuration Profile

We recognize this challenge and for those of you with a sense of adventure I submit an unsupported mobile provisioning profile that will configure you for the UW Wifi and setup the common UW Exchange configuration on your iPhone or iPod touch. It also configures the UW People Directory service.

To install this on your phone, simply visit www.freshlymobile.com on your iPhone/touch (you get to see our newish iPhone optimized design) can tap here. Once installed it should ask you for your email address, Exchange username and password. The username is ‘netid/’ (without quotes) and your UW NetID. For example, if my UW NetID was davidm3, then I would enter: netid/davidm3 for the username. Once it is installed tap done and you are good to go. If you want to change any of the Exchange settings (by default it will sync your calendar, contacts and mail). You will need to visit the setting app on your iPhone, choose Mail, Contacts, Calendars adn then the UW Exchange account. I recommend you back up your iPhone BEFORE installing, so you don’t lose any data.

Let me know if this works for you and whether there are any problems. If people find this helpful, we will work to bring an official, supported version into the mix. We can also look at creating additional profiles for others uses.