I “discovered” a new feature of Microsoft Exchange today as I synced my email and a security policy turned the passcode feature of the iPhone on. Passcode requires you to enter a password every time you access the phone and need to wake it up from having gone to hibernate mode. This is an effective and perhaps wise secuirty feature on the iPhone that also helps deal with the perceived danger of an unmanaged device touching the network, but it is unbearable in practice. I elected to disable my email account.

Unfortunately, disabling the email account is not enough…the passcode remains and must be disabled from the Settings, General menu. Once I realized this, it was a simple matter to turn off. But this is a time-bomb you may wish to anticipate with end users. I can’t imagine anyone would have the patience to live with the passcode enabled. How many times per hour would you be typing that passcode to check your email?

I was curious to provide a link here for IT Admins to manage this security policy, but could find nothing online that gave precise instructions. I did however find tons of information about how to get around this annoying security measure.