I bought a new Nokia Lumia 830 in November of 2014 when they first hit the market. After having other Windows phone with WP7, 7.5, and 8 I was really hooked on the Windows Phone OS. The Lumia 830 was a really solid device at the time. It had a quad-core 1.2Ghz snapdragon 400 chip, 16GB of storage, and 1GB of RAM. For Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 this provides really good speed and responsiveness. Even more important was the removable battery, nano-sim slot, and the microSD card slot.
This device did everything I needed it to do except for one thing. I am an IT professional and my employer uses Exchange behind an MDM (Mobile Device Management) gateway called MobileIron. MDM provides a standard way to let a person bring their own device (BYOD) to the workplace and access certain company assets. Most importantly, it gives the company a bit of control over the enrollment of devices, what they can do, security policy management, access to company apps on the device, etc. The main feature is security because a company can force drive encryption and force the password policy on a device that has access to their data.
When my company moved completely to the MDM solution, I had my device enrolled and it worked. MDM is built into the OS using the "workplace" feature in Windows Phone. Enrolling automatically downloads the workplace app and automatically creates the email account on the device. All that is required is to enter the account password on the email account and it's done.
I started with this device on Windows Phone 8. Periodically the MDM email account would lose it's "connection," and the only fix was to delete the email account on the device and refresh MDM. This would recreate the account and once I entered my account password, it would begin to function again. I had many other "regular" email accounts on the device and they always worked. Myself and another IT coworker had the same problem. His device was a Lumia 1028 (I think), and we noticed that the disconnection would most occur when we traveled in and out of range of a wifi AP that we auto-connected to.
There are a couple dozen Windows Phone devices in the firm and only we were having the issue, but more importantly, my coworker's device stopped having the issue once he stopped connecting to wifi at the office. It was a simple fix for him, but that solution had no effect for my device. He still connected at home and never had the issue again. But my device would require an email account reset randomly and often. Sometimes it would download email only once after the reset, ten times in a day if I chose. Sometimes it would last a week.
I updated the OS whenever I could, and I joined the Microsoft Developer program to get the "beta" OS updates. Nothing worked. I asked on the MS support forum and because I mentioned trying the dev program, they blew me off. I called MS mobile support, had a ticket created and played phone tag for a few weeks. Once I actually spoke with my tech, I was instructed to use the Windows Device Recovery Tool (ended up with v.3.1.5). I had already factory reset my phone about 20 times, but what the hell.
The recovery tool basically just downloads the latest OS and then pushes it to the device. It was a 1.7GB download and of course, it reset the device again. It ended up having the very latest WP 8.1 OS build which was previously on the device. Of course, there was no change in behavior. So the MS tech support person told me to call the MDM provider about the issue. It was the blow off that I was expecting. Maybe Microsoft's MDM implementation isn't as robust as others because MS has it's own competing product (InTune)? I don't know. I know that it's a complex issue, but tech support did the equivalent of "Did you turn it off and on again?"
My employer has other Windows Phone devices enrolled of varying models including the model I was using, and they all work. Only I was having this issue. I had my device enrolled on multiple versions of MobileIron including beta versions on a dev server. None of it had any effect on the stability of my MDM email. I could have burned a few hours of our enterprise support contract, but I really had lost the will to deal with it.
It started to look like it was simply my device, or a combination of the device plus the account and/or policy settings. So I gave up. I hate to say it, but I bought an iPhone. I was a die hard fan of the Windows Phone OS, but I'm done with it. Being on-call, I must get my email and contacts reliably.
I don't like some things about iOS. Some things I like better. I guess this is the world of compromise. Once thing is true though. I don't have to worry about getting my email.
