ACCC Services and the iPhone

Note: iPhone firmware 2.0 or later is required to connect to UIC-Wireless. We recommend updating to version 2.1 or higher, as further releases contain many bug fixes. Version 3.0 or higher is required to import your UICalendar calendar into iCal on the iPhone.

For assistance with configuring your iPhone or iPod Touch to use UIC-Wireless, please visit the ACCCeSS Helpdesk.

Note: iPhone firmware 2.0 or later is required to connect to UIC-Wireless. We recommend updating to version 2.1 or higher, as further releases contain many bug fixes.

Note: Please be aware that iPod Touch devices will not be able to be configured to connect to UIC-Wireless while on campus, as they are not able to have an internet connection through the cellular network, as iPhones are. Therefore, you will need to follow the steps below while you are off-campus and connected to another wireless network.

On your iPhone or iPod Touch, open Safari and browse to this page: accc.uic.edu/iphone and click this UIC configuration profile link. You will be prompted to install the configuration profile:

• Tap the Install button. The profile is unsigned, but it is from the ACCC.
• Enter your UIC netid as your username (example: dvader)
• Enter your ACCC common password as the password
• Tap Done. Once the profile is installed, press the Home button and then tap the Settings icon
• For best results, we recommend setting Wi-Fi to Off, and then back to On.
• Select UIC-Wireless from the list of wireless networks. You should not be prompted to enter your password at this point.
• When connected, you should see a Wi-Fi icon on the top, beside the AT&T status.

ACCC wireless access points require your UIC netid and common password to authenticate. Beware of any access points prompting you for your password only (unaccompanied by your netid).

Screenshots

The ACCCeSS Helpdesk will ask you what your MAC address is if you go to them because you're having trouble connecting you iPhone or iPod Touch to UIC-Wireless. It's in:

Settings General About

And in About, it is listed as your Wi-Fi address. It will look like this: 00:1C:B3:09:85:15

Basic configuration

The following instructions apply to ACCC-managed email servers: mailserv (recommended), tigger, and icarus. Tap the Settings icon, then Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Tap Add Account and select Other at the bottom.

• Enter
• your name as you would like it to appear in your correspondence
• your UIC email address (example: dvader@uic.edu)
• your ACCC common password
• Tap Save and type in the following information for both Incoming and Outgoing mail servers
• Host name: mail.uic.edu
• your UIC netid (example: dvader)
• your ACCC common password
• Tap Save and wait for the verification process to finish.
• Once the settings are verified, click on the newly created account and scroll down to Advanced
• In the advanced settings, scroll down to IMAP path prefix
• Tap the field and type in: mail. Press the Home button to exit the configuration screen and click on the Mail icon to access your account.

Screenshots

Mailbox behaviors

The final step is configuring the special mailboxes (Drafts, Sent, Trash) to use the same ones as on the server. By default, your sent and deleted messages will be stored in a folder on your iPhone. If you want to use the same folders as Webmail, or another email client (Apple Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird, for example) tap the Settings icon, then Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and scroll to Advanced.

In the Mailbox Behaviors section

• Tap Drafts mailbox. From the list labeled On the Server choose the folder you use for drafts.
• Tap Sent mailbox. From the list labeled On the Server choose the folder you use for sent messages.
• Tap Deleted mailbox. From the list labeled On the Server choose the folder you use for deleted messages.

In the Deleted Messages section, select how long you want to keep deleted messages. The default is one week.

The most flexible way to access UICalendar on your iPhone is still to use Safari on the iPhone to use UICal on the Web; the URL is: http://uical.uic.edu. This is the standard UICalendar Web client, and you can do everything you need to do with it.

However, other ways of using UICalendar from the iPhone are getting a lot better now. By far the easiest way is to import your UICalendar calendar into iCal on the iPhone. This gives you everything, including alarms. The only thing that is missing is that you can't enter new events on the iPhone and upload them to UICalendar. Importing your UICal calendar into iCal requires iPhone 3.0.

There are other ways to use UICalendar on the iPhone that do give you two-way sync.

• There are two SyncML iPhone applications available now. These are also described below.
  • One, NextHaus's Synthesis SyncML, but it only syncs Contacts for now.
    
  • The other, Synthesis AG's Todo+Cal+Sync syncs your whole UICal calendar, both ways, but doesn't use iCal on the iPhone.
    
    
• There are two two-way syncs with iCal work now. (By two-way, I mean that it syncs both ways -- brings changes from UICal to iCal on the iPhone and changes from iCal to UICal.)
  • You can sync the iPhone with Outlook Connector and iTunes on Windows personal computers. It is now quite easy. See PC Magazines's Sync Your iPhone 3G with Vista and Outlook for instructions. (Which are not limited to Vista or 3G iPhones; you can use Outlook 2003 or 2007.) Apple's Web site has a lot of troubleshooting information.
    
  • You can sync iCal on a Mac two-ways with UICal using SyncJe for the Mac. Then use iTunes as usual to sync iCal on the Mac with iCal on the iPhone; this sync is also two ways, after syncing. This is also easy to set up, but SyncJe for Mac OS only runs on Intel Macs running Leopard. There is a free 15-day trial of the software.
    
    
• Send email to uicalendar@uic.edu if you need help setting any of these up.

Use the instructions below to create a SyncML iCal URL link to your UICalendar agenda. After that you can use it to bring UICal data into other calendaring software in two ways.

• If your calendaring software allows -- and iCal on the Mac does and now iPhone 3.0 does -- you can subscribe the URL to it, and it will automatically go to the URL, download the data, and put it in your calendar for you. This leads to a read-only calendar.
  
  
• Or you can go to the URL on the Web yourself. This will download a file called netid.ics (that is, adabyron.ics for Ada Byron) and then you can import the file into your calendaring software. This gives you a calendar that you can modify in iCal, but you can't upload your changes back to UICal. Mac iCal allows this and you can sync the imported Mac iCal calendar to the iPhone. You cannot do this directly on the iPhone.

In iCal as with other calendaring software, the first is a lot easier -- you set it up once and forget about it. But it results in a read-only calendar. The second is more trouble; you have get the calendar data yourself and delete the previous calendar every time you import a new one. But it results in a calendar that you can change, which can be useful.

In either case, this link is one way -- data comes down from UICalendar only. Any changes you make in iCal on the Mac or the iPhone will not be transferred back to UICalendar.

If you have iPhone Version 3.0 or higher, this is probably the way you want to sync UICalendar with iCal on your iPhone. This method involves using the ACCC UICal SyncML service to sync UICal with iCal on your phone over the Web.

This method has two problems:

• The sync to iCal is one way: UICalendar iCal, so all changes have to be made in UICal. You subscribe to the calendar in iCal; the subscription is read-only.
  
  
• Only Events are synced.

The Good News is that it's easy and alarms are synced.

The not quite so easy way gives you a calendar that you can modify (but you can't upload your changes into UICal): Visit the UICal SyncML Web page yourself, import the downloaded file into iCal on your Mac, set a few Sync options (once), and Sync your iPhone. Well, you also have to delete the last calendar you imported, but that's easy.

1. Make a UICal SyncML Feed

You must be connected to a phone or Wi-Fi network to do this.

1. In Safari on your iPhone to the UICal Utilities Page (on the ACCC Email & Calendar home page) and login with your UIC netid and ACCC common password.
2. Touch the second from the bottom link, Create/Edit links on your UICal calendar.
   
3. We want to Create a new link to your calendar, the first section.
   1. This is for your own use, so leave the calendar - full access to all event details radio button selected. (You would use the public radio button if you were creating a link for other people to use; it would allow them to download only those items on your agenda that you had marked as Public.)
   2. Click Create Link.
      
4. The UICal SyncML URL created is listed both at the top and in a new section at the bottom of the screen. The section at the bottom will be there whenever you go back to the UICalendar Utilities, so you can copy it again or delete it.
   
5. If you are doing this on your iPhone, tap the paragraph to select, drag the bottom blue dot up to select only the link, and tap Copy to copy full access ical link on the iPhone.

2. Import your UICal Web link into iCal on your iPhone

You must be connected to the phone or a Wi-Fi network to do this.

1. Go to Settings Mail, Contacts, Calendar Add Account Other Add subscribed calendar
2. Paste the UIC Web link into the Server box and tap Next.
3. You can rename the calendar if you want.
4. At this point, your iPhone will go to the Web URL to verify that it is a valid calendar.
5. Use to Settings Mail, Contacts, Calendar Fetch New Data to select how often your iCal data will be updated. (It uses the same schedule as you use for email. I use Fetch Hourly; it doesn't seem to use up the battery on my iPhone overly much. Downloading data often will kill your battery sooner.)

No netids or passwords are needed and alarms are synced, but you can't change when they will go off from the iPhone.

How your UICal Calendar will look in iCal on the iPhone

• This event is in Ada Byron's calendar and was created by her, though it doesn't really look like it.
• When you open the event, there isn't an Edit button, which means you can't editi it.
• This event doesn't have an alarm, but if it did, it would be shown in the Event screen.
• You can tap on the inviter and get their contact information.

Here there are two two-way steps: (1) using iTunes to sync your iPhone to iCal on your Mac, and (2) using NextHaus's SyncJe for Macs to sync iCal on your Mac to UICal over the Web. I tried this briefly -- I didn't have an Intel Mac of my own, so I had to borrow an Intel Mac to work with -- and I had a few problems.

1. It only runs on Intel Macs running Leopard.
2. It only synced individual items for about a week or two and I didn't see where you could change that in the preferences. (I may have missed it, however, and I didn't try the date options on the server paths.)
3. There was a problem with the contacts. It said it uploaded two items, didn't download anything. I tested syncing Ada Byron's calendar. Ada has tons of contacts in her UICal account. The account on the Intel Mac I was using may have only had two contacts; I didn't take the time to check. I wouldn't recommend using SyncJe to sync contacts anyway.
4. It didn't sync tasks.
5. Ada has a number of UICal "Day Events". SyncJe handled them incorrectly and ended up duplicating them on the server. Ada doesn't have "Daily Notes", but I expect the same thing would happen with them.

The Good News is that it's easy to set up. SyncJe for Macs is a standard SyncML client, so the info you need to set it is in the Oracle Calendar Mobile Data Sync page.

Please let us know you decide to try it out. And do make backups before you do. I would have been unhappy if the Day Events in my real calendar had been duplicated. Though it was only for a week or so, so I could have deleted them easily enough.

The long awaited wireless SyncML solution for the iPhone has come. SyncML is the best way to sync smartphones and PDAs, but Synthesis SyncML for the iPhone isn't quite finished yet. This is part of an email we received from them:

To find the application once it appears in the App Store, search for "Synthesis SyncML".. [It's in Production.]

The initial release will be a free download from the App Store, supporting only contact sync. Calendar synchronisation is prepared, but at this time Apple does not allow access to the calendar data yet. The Synthesis SyncML client for iPhone will become a paid application once it is complete with calendar synchronisation.

The version that is there now does only support contact sync, but it does that well. So we have a ways to wait yet.

Synthesis SyncML now actually did sync my contacts, and the sync was very fast over UIC-Wireless. The problem that I had before -- downloaded contacts from UICal, but they didn't go into Contacts, and the net result was that it erased the contacts I already had on my phone -- was a bug. Synthesis says they fixed it in version 1.0.2. I don't know about 1.0.2, but I can testify that version 1.0.4 works just fine.

The settings were the same as those for other smart phones, Appendix H: Oracle Calendar Mobile Data Sync.

Settings Server Settings Server, URL: https://uical.uic.edu/ocst-bin/ocas.fcgi

Settings Server Settings Server, SymcML version: SymcML 1.1

Settings Server Settings Server Login User: your UIC netid, and Password:, your ACCC common password

Settings Contacts, Server Path: ./contacts

It's the Settings, Contacts, Sync Mode: setting that I had to play with. Update device was the only one that synced, and now it works just fine.

Screenshots

We can't win this, can we? The lack of direct SyncML sync to iCal on the iPhone is because Apple won't let third party software interact with iCal. Synthesis AG got tired of waiting for this to change, and decided to make their own calendar and task application; Todo+Cal+Sync is the result. And they did a nice job.

There are only two problems:

• Because it doesn't use iCal on the iPhone, it doesn't alarm you to let you know when events are happening.
  
  
• Like SyncJe, Todo+Cal+Sync handled my "Day Events" incorrectly; it created a new copy on the previous day each time I synced. And every time I synced. So you probably won't want to use this if you are into Day Events or Daily Notes. I don't.

Oh, and it has a third problem also, it is $14.99.

Two display quirks:

• I couldn't figure out how to change the display from one Calendar display to another (Day, Week, Month), and to the Task display. You swipe the screen horizontally. (I wasn't thinking "i"Phone, was I?)
  
  
• You can only get to the Sync screen from the Day, Week, and Todo views, by tapping the double arrow equal-sign Sync icon in the upper left of the screens.
  
  
• There are links on the Synthesis AG - SyncML products for iPhone and iPod Touch page to PDF files with info on how to use the product. The two-page Short Reference is useful; there are lots of stuff on each Todo+Cal+Sync screen.

The settings were the same as those for other smart phones, Appendix H: Oracle Calendar Mobile Data Sync. To enter the settings you need to go to the Sync page (Day or Todo view, tap the double-arrow equal-sign icon in the upper left), then tap Settings at the bottom.

Settings Server Settings Server, URL: https://uical.uic.edu/ocst-bin/ocas.fcgi

Settings Server Settings Server, SymcML version: SymcML 1.1

Settings Server Settings Server, Ignore SSL errors: I have this ON; it works for me.

Settings Server Settings Server Login, User: your UIC netid, and Password:, your ACCC common password

Settings Contacts, Sync Mode : Slow Sync the first time, Normal after that

Settings Contacts, Server Path: ./Contacts

Settings Todos, Sync Mode : Slow Sync the first time, Normal after that

Settings Todos, Server Path: ./Calendar/Tasks

Settings Calendar, Sync Mode : Slow Sync the first time, Normal after that

Settings Calendar, Server Path: ./Calendar/Events

And I suggest that you do turn the Date Range Limit ON and select a resonable range to sync. The sync will fail if you try to sync too much at a time.

Tap Done.

Screenshots

How it looks when you use it; remember to swipe horizontally to step from one view to the next.

How to set it up; click the Sync icon on all views above except the Monthly calendar view to get to the Sync page.