Azure Hybrid & Cloud Migration Blog

Apple iPhone iOS 6 Bug for Exchange Server Meeting Invitation | Apple iPhone iOS 6 Compatibility Issues with Microsoft Exchange Server

Author: Zahir Hussain Shah, MVP Exchange Server

Recently I heard that one of the Fortune 500 company has sent an announcement to their employees for not to upgrade their Apple devices for iOS 6, because there is a bug found in the iOS 6, where if an employee having iOS 6 enabled device receives a meeting invitation from other employees, those who are using same Exchange Server messaging infrastructure, decline the meeting request, then iOS 6 based device instead of sending the notification to the meeting organizer that user will not be able to make it, this iOS 6 device sends meeting cancellation notices to the entire meeting distribution list, effectively canceling the invitation for all attendees.

Apple also documented the same on their Apple Support Communities, you can read more about this bug here.

So being an Exchange Administrator, if you will perform the same test on your side, you might not get the same behavior or result, but at the same time, I know few reported problems, where the meeting attendees list is huge, and people reported that this happens only where the number of meeting attendees are huge in counts.

Solution / Recommendations:

As a precautionary step, what we can do here is that, we can make our users aware about this bug, and all the iOS device can also be blocked at the Exchange CAS server.

1) You can find all the device partnership with your Exchange Server, those who have Apple iOS 6 installed, with the below CMDLet:

Get-ActiveSyncDevice | ? {$_.DeviceOS -Like “iOS 6.0*”} |ft UserDisplayName, DeviceOS, DeviceModel,DeviceUserAgent, FirstSyncTime auto

2) Then we can block these devices to get into our Exchange messaging organization, using the below CMDLet:

New-ActiveSyncDeviceAccessRule -QueryString “iOS 6.0 10A403” -Characteristic DeviceOS -AccessLevel Block

Cheers!

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Azure Hybrid Blog

3 responses to “Apple iPhone iOS 6 Bug for Exchange Server Meeting Invitation | Apple iPhone iOS 6 Compatibility Issues with Microsoft Exchange Server”

  1. Razvan

    Hi,
    Very nice article.

    On the first PowerShell command, at the end, there is “auto”. Shouldn’t be “-AutoSize” ?

    With “auto” I receive the following error:

    Format-Table : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument ‘auto’.

  2. sell your cell phone accessories

    Howdy just wanted to give you a quick heads up.

    The text in your article seem to be running off the screen in Ie.
    I’m not sure if this is a formatting issue or something to do with internet browser compatibility but I thought I’d post to let you know.
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  3. Apple IOS 6.1 Incompatibility with Exchange Server causing massive Exchange Mailbox Transaction Log generation and filling Exchange Mailbox Database Storage « Zahir Hussain Shah's | Exchange Ideas Blog

    […] in October, 2012 I blogged about the bug found in Apple IOS 6, where if an employee having iOS 6 enabled device receives a […]

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