Netgain

After Apple rolled out its latest operating system last week, iOS 11, organizations using Office 365, Exchange Server 2016 and Outlook.com may have learned the hard way over the last week that those email clients were not compatible with the latest version of the popular mobile operating system. More specifically, these email accounts that used iOS 11’s default Mail app were not able to send or reply to messages.

Up until today, Microsoft’s suggested resolution was for users to download the free Outlook for iOS client from the App Store. Or, for those running Exchange Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016, Microsoft’s suggested fix was to ask your system administrator to disable HTTP/2 in Windows Server 2016 as a workaround. For anyone interested in how exactly to do this, you can read this article.

Mercifully, Apple released a patch to this problem this morning, iOS 11.0.1, which resolves this issue, so if you were experiencing these issues with your organization’s email, you can simply upgrade to the latest version of iOS 11.

Apple runs an extensive beta testing program before rolling out new operating systems to users, and even though this bug was allegedly reported back in July 2017 during the beta testing period for iOS 11, Apple did not fix the Office 365/Exchange bug before launching iOS 11 to the public. Regardless, it appears that the issue is now fixed. So, if you haven’t upgraded your iDevice to iOS 11, feel free to do so now (the patch will be included in the latest version). Or, if you were one of the first to upgrade your operating system to iOS 11, simply update to the newest version and you’ll be fine.

This situation serves as an uncomfortable reminder that new software versions sometimes include instabilities and bugs in their initial release, so being the first to download the newest version can cause you headaches. Sometimes it can be beneficial to wait to upgrade software versions until any bugs can be found and necessary patches created.