When you turn on a mobile device for the first time,
there are a number of settings that are already configured.
For example, your phone number should be working,
and text messaging should be working.
But there are other configuration settings
that may need to be manually set on your phone.
For example, email is a good example.
Every organization handles email a little bit differently,
and most organizations will have a corporate configuration
that needs to be added to the mobile device.
You may also need to configure access to a cloud-based service
or to a synchronization service so that anything
you do on your mobile device will also
appear on other devices that you use throughout the day.
Many organizations rely on Microsoft's email service
to be able to communicate to others within the organization,
and they often use the cloud-based service
of Microsoft 365.
You can also use Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Exchange
if you're running your own exchange servers.
This is the same if you're using Microsoft's Hotmail
or Microsoft's cloud-based Outlook.com service.
This is one that requires you to authenticate to Microsoft 365,
and this is often just a username and a password.
Once you add that authentication,
you then gain access to your email settings,
and you're able to enable and disable
different items that you want to synchronize with that service.
For example, with Microsoft 365, you can not only
synchronize the email between your mobile device
and other email systems you use, but you can also
configure and synchronize contacts, calendars, reminders,
and notes.
This way if you create a note on your mobile phone,
the note automatically appears on Microsoft 365
on your desktop and vice versa.
This is a very similar process for many different types
of email services, and once you authenticate,
you're able to send mail, receive mail, or configure
any of these email services.
Another useful configuration setting
may be connectivity to Apple's iCloud.
This is obviously limited to Apple devices,
and it's integrated into iOS and iPadOS.
To connect to iCloud, you would use your iCloud username
and password, and that provides you
access to configure synchronization options.
There are extensive synchronization options
for iCloud, and you're able to select and de-select
exactly what information you'd like to upload to the cloud
and things you may want to keep local
on your individual device.
This means if you're using macOS,
you can synchronize everything between your desktop,
your laptop, and your mobile devices.
This is a very simple way to keep these updated,
and it's also a great way to keep
the backups of your system constantly updated
in the cloud.
If you lose your phone, you can simply
log into a new phone with your iCloud credentials,
and all of this information will be automatically downloaded
and synchronized with your new device.
As you can see, there are extensive configuration
settings for iCloud, but you can still
control exactly what data is synchronized.
For example, you may want mail to be
synchronized between your mobile device and other devices.
You may want to have pictures, music, and video stored
in iCloud, or synchronize calendar settings or contact
details.
As you can imagine, this could be sending and receiving
a large amount of data, so you also
have control over how that data is sent and over what networks.
For example, you can configure the system
to allow cellular transfers or only allow transfers over
faster 802.11 networks.
You can also enable and disable different network connections
or control the use of exactly how you download when
you're on a cellular network.
For example, cellular data can be
set to automatically download or not download,
and you can set exactly how much data can be transferred
over that cellular network.