If your iPhone was connected to an Exchange server for email, contact or calendar synchronization prior to your upgrade to the 3.0 software, you may have run into the same problem that was bugging me for a day or so: the timeout on the passcode lock gets set to "Immediate," forcing you to enter the code almost every time you pick up the phone. Secure, sure, but very annoying. Going to the usual settings location to adjust the timeout shows no choices other than the insta-lock; what to do?

A thread on the Apple discussions boards points to the answer. Since the ActiveSync link to the Exchange server controls some security policies on the phone, you need to refresh those controls; the easiest way to do that, short of deleting and recreating the Exchange account, is to turn off all three sync modes and the Push setting. Once that's done, you can go back to the passcode lock screen and disable the lock or adjust the timeout. Put your sync settings back the way they were and your changes to the passcode config should remain in place.

While this is an annoying quirk, it's not all gripes and grimaces in the Exchange support department. At long last, users of Exchange calendars can send meeting invitations (hallelujah!); Exchange 2007 users can even view the reply status of attendees. Users can specify additional mail folders for sync, and Exchange 2007 users can search server-side mail from their devices.

For a full rundown on the enterprise-friendly features of iPhone OS 3.0, check out the Enterprise Integration guide via Apple's enterprise features page.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

We seem to be mentioning both Parallels and Kerio pretty frequently, and they keep coming up with cool stuff. Kerio announced today that it will be offering its mail and collaboration platform, Kerio Mailserver, as a Virtual Appliance for Parallels on the Mac, news that will be of interest to a lot of folks looking for an even easier way to get away from Exchange.

The Virtual Appliance comes with a preconfigured version of CentOS 5.3 Linux, optimized for Kerio Mailserver. It looks like an ideal solution for businesses that need to run more than one OS, allowing hardware to be shared and making efficient use of server power.

I'm guessing you'd want an XServe or high-end Mac Pro if you're planning to deploy multiple Virtual Appliances, but I would think that the KMS Virtual Appliance should run on any Intel Mac which can do a decent job of running Parallels to begin with. If you missed it, check out the WWDC video of a tricked-out Mac Pro running Leopard and two installs of Vista with Parallels.

The Kerio Mailserver Virtual Appliance comes ready-to-run (if you have Parallels Desktop or Server) as a 30-day trial. Pricing starts at $499US for ten users, with an option to add integrated McAfee Anti-Virus for an extra $100US ($599).

If you have Mac servers in your business, you weren't left out of the Snow Leopard fun during the keynote earlier today. Apple also announced that Mac OS X Server 10.6, A.K.A. Snow Leopard Server, will be shipping in September. Like Snow Leopard, the server version of the OS provides 64-bit support, and many of the Apple applications have been updated to take advantage of that. For example, SMB file server performance is 2.3x faster than Leopard Server, and AFP file server performance is now 1.3x faster.

New features include:

iCal Server 2 -- This upgrade to Leopard's iCal Server now provides push notification, wireless accessibility to your calendar from any iPhone, a new web-based calendaring interface, and updates to CalDAV that now allow you to invite colleagues to meetings via email.

Podcast Producer 2 -- Podcast Producer, which was added to the server mix in Leopard, is now improved with Podcast Composer. This new feature lets you create your own workflows for automating completion and publishing of podcasts. There's also a new Setup Assistant in Server Admin that can set up Podcast Producer 2 in a manner of minutes, even if you're setting up a cluster of servers.

Wiki Server 2 -- Workgroups wishing to collaborate now have a little bit more to love from Wiki Server. The only real new feature is iPhone support; users can securely log into confidential wikis and content, and even review content and comments from the iPhone.

Mobile Access Server -- The piece that I'm probably the most excited about as an Xserve admin is Mobile Access Server. This new feature is like a custom VPN for Mac and iPhone users. As long as they're set up in the server's directory service, users can get secure, encrypted access to the server and network with very little hassle.

Mail Server -- The engine running Mail Server has been totally redesigned for much faster service, and now provides push email, vacation messages and server-side rules, and improvements to mail server clustering.

Web Server -- The biggest change to Web Server is that it can now do HTTP live video streaming. Performance is about 1.3x faster than Leopard Server's web services as well.

Client Management -- Organizations that are deploying many iPhones will love the new client management piece of Snow Leopard Server. It has an iPhone configuration utility for creating profiles that can be emailed to corporate users, thus setting up secure services in a few seconds. Administrators can now also use NetRestore to rebuild Macs over networks, based on either a custom build disk image or a standard OS X install disk.

Best of all, Snow Leopard Server will cost $499 for unlimited users (a sharp reduction from Leopard Server's price of $999 unlimited, $499 for 10 users) and should be shipping at the same time OS X 10.6 is available to the rest of us. I'd just be happy if Apple has finally fixed a lot of the issues with backing up network users to Mac OS X Server using Time Machine.

Yesterday, amidst the SlingMobile débâcle and an OS update, Kerio Technologies released Kerio Mail MailServer 6.7. The mail and collaboration server, often used as a replacement for Exchange, has added several new features, including a few geared toward Mac users.

The Kerio Global Address List (GAL) is a new feature that provides a simple way to get address and contact info from clients like Outlook or Entourage. It syncs and authenticates with both Microsoft Active Directory and Apple Open Directory, as well as Kerio's own user directory. In any company, people join and leave the group, and users are often required to manually update their address books to add and remove entries. With GAL, it's a single directory in a single place, and changes are transparent for users. It supports Entourage, works with the iPhone and functions offline.

Kerio MailServer 6.7 also comes with an auto-configuration script for Entourage 2008, downloadable within the Kerio client, providing pre-configured account setup. There's support for private events in iCal, allowing users to maintain personal schedules without requiring a separate calendar application. AddressBook gets some additional love with support for synchronizing groups (which become Categories in Entourage).

Kerio has had good support for iPhone users for a while now. For non-iPhone mobile users, there's new support for viewing HTML emails on Nokia devices, as well as DataViz RoadSync compatibility.

The MailServer itself is now a certified VMWare appliance, and promotes compatibility with two new Linux distributions: Ubuntu 8 and Debian 5. CentOS is the preferred platform for running on VMWare. IT admins and users alike will appreciate the dramatically improved anti-spam engine, which has been optimized for multi-CPU use, parallel processing of email messages for large queues, improved heuristics and 13 layers of spam protection.

In addition to some of the previously available migration tools provided by Kerio, a new IMAP migration tool relieves what is undoubtedly one of the biggest headaches in switching mail servers: keeping your old mail. It's a cross-platform utility which moves messages, folders, accounts and domains from the old system to Kerio MailServer. The IMAP migration tool has been fully tested with OS X.

Kerio's pricing has remained the same with this release. Starting at $499 for 10 users, there's a range of options available for different configurations and add-ons, as well as subscription pricing. See Kerio's pricing page for more details.

Sometimes you have to use Windows. Supporting clients in multiple-OS environments makes this a necessity for some Mac users, while others want to run applications that are available in Windows only. You can get a preview of the latest flavor of Windows, Windows 7, by running Release Candidate 1 of the new OS either in a virtual environment such as VMWare Fusion, Parallels, or VirtualBox, or in Apple's own Boot Camp. Christina did a thorough rundown of the options for running Win 7 on Mac back in January.

Of course, you may not own Fusion or Parallels, and perhaps you don't want to have to boot into Windows separately. In that case, you can download a copy of Sun's VirtualBox application (it's free) and then download a copy of Windows 7 RC1 from the Microsoft website (it's free, too!). Follow these detailed instructions or watch the video, and you'll have a free way to test Windows 7 until at least June 1, 2010. Windows 7 will shut down after every two hours of use after March 1, 2010, which is Microsoft's subtle way of telling you to buy the OS or update to a later build.

If you're a VMWare Fusion user, the VMWare team has instructions and a video available here. Want to try out Win7 RC1 with Boot Camp? There are instructions here. For Parallels 4 users, I was unable to find a good set of instructions, so if any TUAW readers can provide me with a link, I'll update this post.

How is Windows 7 RC1 as an operating system? It's faster than Windows Vista on my 3 year old iMac, and some features look surprisingly Mac-like. I'll leave it to you as an exercise to see how much you like or dislike it.

Citrix, the folks who provide a popular way to run applications on remote servers using a thin client, have announced the immediate availability of Citrix Receiver for iPhone (click opens iTunes). We saw the Citrix guys running around the show floor at Macworld Expo this year, surreptitiously demoing an early build of this app to anyone who walked within range.

Receiver is a free app that enables iPhone and iPod touch users to run any Windows application as a service on their device. Connecting to a Citrix XenApp environment, iPhone fans can securely work with apps from Oracle, SAP, McKesson, Cerner, and other vendors. The only information sent over the wireless connection consists of screen taps and gestures, keyboard input, and screen updates, so it is simple to keep data secure.

Receiver for iPhone uses Citrix HDX to deliver high-definition content to the device so that Flash and Silverlight content can be viewed as well. Flash on an iPhone -- now there's an idea!

In enterprises such as hospitals that depend heavily on Citrix already, Receiver is going to be "well received." This should help Apple's iPhone sales efforts in the enterprise market really take off.

Marketcircle's Daylite is a popular business productivity management application for the Mac platform, and it was recently updated to version 3.9. While this sounds like it might have been just another version upgrade, it was actually a major update to Daylite. Coinciding with the release of Daylite 3.9, Marketcircle also released Daylite Server and Daylite Touch, two new components that bring the power of Daylite to the iPhone and iPod touch platforms.

We'll be talking with Marketcircle CEO Alykhan Jetha (AKA A.J.) this Sunday, April 19th, at 10 PM EDT on the TUAW Talkcast, so be sure to listen in and bring any questions that you'd like to ask A.J. about Daylite.

In a previous work experience, I was a project manager for a certain large IT service provider with a three-letter acronym for a name. Part of the reason I left that job to become a self-employed Mac consultant was that the project management tools we used were non-intuitive, slow, and Windows-based (the fact that my boss sucked was the other part of the reason...).

App4Mac has just announced the final beta of Projector, their new project management application for the Mac platform. The official version will ship on April 24th at a price of €49 (US$65.25). Projector replaces App4Mac's previous project management offering, xTime Project. If you're an xTime Project user, you can upgrade for free to Projector by simply installing the new application and using your existing license.

Employers: do you want to know exactly what your employees are doing every second of the day on their Macs? Would you like to be able to log every keystroke they make, take screenshots of their Macs every once in a while, or even take pictures of them with the iSight that's built into their Mac to make sure that they're working? If so, ActyMac DutyWatch is just your cup of tea.
Without your employees knowing, you can monitor everything they post, open, and use. DutyWatch captures all keystrokes and logs every program that is launched or quit. If an employee uses certain keywords, DutyWatch sends you an email so you can scrutinize that person even more closely. DutyWatch also records every email, chat, website visit, or web search. Make sure that your employees aren't reading TUAW on your dime!

In the example above, your employee Michael has been spending a lot of time watching QuickTime movies and IM'ing in Adium. Of course, he'll lie to you and tell you that he's been watching training movies and texting the Miami office, but you've got just the proof you need to fire him. That'll get those other slackers in line!

You can purchase ActyMac DutyWatch for US$99.95 direct from the website, and quantity discounts are available.

Astute readers noticed some Apple store downtime earlier this morning. While I was hoping for something soaked in Unicorn tears, I guess I'll settle for a drool-worthy Xserve update.

The rumors were right on target, and the new Xserve sports Intel's "Nehalem" Xeon processor (just like the recent Mac Pro refresh), which Apple is touting as offering "twice the performance" when compared to last year's model.*

* There is always an asterisk in these types of comparison so please read the fine print before taking any marketing slogans as gospel.

The new Xserve systems look really hot. Check out these specs for the $2999US base model:

• a single 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Xeon 5500 series processor with 8MB of fully shared L3 cache
• 3GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM
• a single 160GB 7200 rpm SATA Apple Drive Module
• dual Gigabit Ethernet on-board
• two PCI Express 2.0 x16 expansion slots
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 256 MB with Mini DisplayPort output
• two FireWire® 800 and three USB 2.0 ports

And of course, the requisite unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server version 10.5 Leopard.

If the standard offerings aren't powerful enough, the Xserve can be customized to include two Quad-Core Xeon's running at 2.26, 2.66 or 2.93 GHz. An 8-core 2.26 Xserve configure like the base system runs $3599US.

The new Xserve also offers an optional 128-GB SSD boot drive, as well as options for RAID cards, and dual or quad channel 4Gb Fibre channel cards.

This generation of chipsets is more energy efficient and Apple is touting the newest Xserve as the "greenest ever."

The new Xserve is available now at Apple.com and at your local Apple store or authorized dealer.

The Data Robotics Drobo brought easy mass storage to power users and small businesses back in 2007, and since then, higher hard disk capacities and word of mouth have turned it into a popular storage solution. The simple design, proprietary BeyondRaid redundant-disk technology, and easy expandability are perfect for anyone who has a lot of information to store, and for businesses with up to 25 employees. However, Data Robotics wanted to move further into the lucrative SMB storage market and didn't have a product that would handle up to 100 people and fit in a standard server rack.

That all changed this morning, with the announcement of DroboPro. Think of Drobo on steroids, with slots for eight SATA drives instead of four, two FireWire 800 ports, a USB 2.0 port, and an Ethernet port that is used for iSCSI connectivity, and throughput rates in the 75-80 megabyte/second range. Give this über-Drobo the same easy setup and management, quiet operation, and cool looks of the original device, and you have a winner.

I interviewed Tom Loverro, Director of Product Marketing at Data Robotics, last week about the company's new product.

MacRumors is calling attention to a PC World report: new Nehalem-based Xserve models are expected soon, based on a slipup on Apple's Hong Kong site (gotta watch those ALT tags, folks!). The replacement units for Apple's Harpertown and Penryn Xeon-based rackmount gear should be able to leverage the new chip architecture and power management features to supercharge parallel operations in the Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X Server.

If you're in the market for Xserves, would you buy now for a known quantity or wait for the latest and greatest? Let us know below.

Apple Mac malware: Caught on camera from Sophos Labs on Vimeo.

It's not every day that you can watch Mac malware in action, but the team at Sophos Labs has put together the demonstration video above; it shows a malicious installer downloaded from a site pretending to serve up an HD video player, which actually carries the RSPlug-F trojan. Even though Mac users would still have to provide admin credentials to install the application (unlike Windows users, who might catch the Zlob malware just by visiting the webpage), it would be perfectly natural to go ahead and authenticate after downloading an installer... but not a good idea in this case. The fake site and bogus application are appearing in two versions, one billed as MacCinema and another trying to steal the goodwill of a legitimate Windows app called HDTV Player (the real app is from blazevideo.com).

RSPlug-F does try to change your DNS settings to point at bad-guy controlled servers, which could conceivably result in you being redirected to malicious or phony sites; however, if your ISP is on the ball, those bogus DNS servers are already blocked. The only way to catch this bit of malware is via the installer, but it's easy to see how an innocent Mac user might be fooled by the convincing-seeming download site.

[H/T Ars Technica Infinite Loop]

You can find Mac applications that have been around longer than Retrospect, but not many that have the same ratio of copies installed to jobs/sanity saved. The venerable backup tool, now in its third decade and published by EMC Insignia (original developer Dantz was acquired a few years back) has been revitalized in version 8, now shipping, with scores of features that bring it to reasonable parity with the Windows version of the app.

The new Retrospect, which EMC previewed at Macworld Expo, breaks the administrative UI away from the underlying backup engine and allows backup managers to control multiple instances of the tool from one console. Simultaneous execution is supported now, along with advanced disk-to-disk backups, faster catalog rebuilds, single-write/multi-read operation, improved networking and tape drive support, and media & catalog cross-platform compatibility with the Windows 7.6 version. Video tutorials for the new v8 are here.

Retrospect 8, for the moment, only runs on Intel machines but can be used to back up PowerPC clients (PPC support is coming in a near-term update, the company says). Pricing starts at $129US for the Desktop edition with support for 3 client machines (a maintenance plan adds $120), and ranges up to $1700 for the Multi-Server, Unlimited Client version; there are also Single Server 20-client and unlimited client licenses available at intervening price points. Upgrade pricing is available through the EMC site.

This post is a first for me in that I'm typing (or tapping) it in on an iPhone using our Blogsmith CMS. No, there's not a Blogsmith iPhone app that I'm aware of, and I'm not using Safari on the iPhone to pull up our web portal. Instead, I'm controlling my office iMac from about 16 miles away using my iPhone and LogMeIn Ignition.

LogMeIn is a remote access and control application for Macs and PCs that creates a secure connection between two computers by having each logged into a secure server. LogMeIn Ignition adds the ability to control a Mac or PC from your iPhone. To test Ignition, I set up a LogMeIn Free for Mac account and then loaded the app onto my iPhone 3G. How did it work? Read on for more details.