Adding work exceptions to Connection Manager

Over on the microsoft.public.smartphone.developer newsgroup there was an interesting discussion about connecting to corporate networks using Smartphone devices. One of our customers wanted to VPN back into his corporation to get his mail, but was having trouble since their VPN connections didn't support name resolutions for corporate servers. I suggested using the direct IP address for the mail server, but as was quickly pointed out to me, all directly-entered IP addresses map to The Internet by default on Smartphone.

If you're on Smartphone 2003 or later there's an easy, albeit buried, way to solve this. Go into the Data Connections control panel and look in the menu for the Work Exceptions menu item. Add the IP addresses you want to have map to the Work network and you'll be all set to go!

[Author: Neil Enns]

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 05, 2004
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  April 22, 2006
  This worked for me! i am using a T-mobile SDA and I have been trying to sync my exchange for the longest time. I could never figure out why it would not connect the VPN when trying to sync. I added the URL/IP to the work exceptions list and viola! it worked!! Why couldn't they just have added a checkbox in the wizard that says "Use VPN connection to sync with this server" ? I guess hindsight is always 20/20...