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Gmail For Android Gets Microsoft Exchange Support
An anonymous reader writes: Google has updated Gmail for Android with a very notable feature: support for Microsoft Exchange. You can download the latest version of the app from Google Play (if you don't see it, don't worry: Google says the gradual rollout may take three or more days). The company had actually released this feature a few months ago, but at the time, it was only available for Nexus devices. With the new update, Google is making the feature available to a wider audience. "Exchange support was previously only available on our Nexus devices, but as of today, Exchange support covers mail, contacts, and calendar data in Android across all devices," a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat.
Is it really that useful to merge these three types of data into a single program? This sounds as dumb as merging a music player, video player, device manager and online music/video/app store into a single program.
Does it work with Office 365 accounts too?
If you can't turn off conversation view. It is annoying on personal email but I deal with it (conversation view buggers up threads, splitting up emails where they shouldn't be as an example), but that would be intolerable on work email.
For those using Exchange for access to work email, Touchdown is a better paid-for solution that won't erase your phone with work policies, they're only applied to the Touchdown app itself. That makes it worth the price right there.
I wish my ISP supported IMAP (Are you listening Verizon? Oh, of course not.) but they don't. Only POP. And Gmail app says you can support POP accounts by adding them to your Live email account and accessing them via Exchange, ... but you can't access them directly from the app. Oh. No thank you. Deep sigh.
The gmail app on nexus devices has been terrible in terms of client certificate support for exchange activesync.
It worked perfectly in android 4.4 on nexus devices, and starting with 5.0 it was broken.
Google's tech support on this is completely useless, they just say, "Talk to your exchange administrator."
Oddly enough, samsung devices running android 5.0 or later don't use the "gmail" code to connect to exchange activesync, and samsung phones work perfectly with client certificates.
If this means that non-nexus devices will now use gmail to connect to activesync this is a big step backward.
On my android phone I use the MS Outlook app and find it to be actually pretty good. I can turn off the conversation view, which I hate and I get access to all the same folders I have at my desktop. Plus, it's free with office.
I know there are a lot of people who would like to put everything into one bucket, but personally I do not want my private emails anywhere near my work emails.
The worst part of having my MS Exchange emails going to my gmail inbox would be the weekends.
I would see that there are emails from work when I checked my gmail and then I would feel obligated to read them and the feel obligated to actually do something.
No... I prefer to not know I have an email until Monday, when I turn notifications back on.
Most corporate Exchange servers are either behind a VPN or proxy; have some third-party authentication wrapper (or even worse, an in-house custom one); or straight up don't let you access it without being hard-wired to their network with a "blessed" computer.
Most people who use an Exchange server for work won't be able to use this...
The four main features in Outlook are Mail, Contacts, Calendar, and Notes, but for some reason apps like this don't support Notes. It's the same on my iPhone 6 Plus, I have to use a 3rd party app to sync Notes with Exchange.
End-to-end crypto solutions on the client side, such as S/MIME & PGP have existed for nearly 20 years.
But for Android users, there is simply no decent e-mail app in which supports this type of required security in Google Play store, while also supporting office365 (required for work), tablet mode, and threaded message viewing.
Stock mail app, Gmail, Outlook, Touchdown, Nine, etc., none of these apps meet of these criteria. And don't mention Samsung Knox, which is only available with stock Samsung ROM on its hardware, and won't install or work with custom ROM's on its hardware such as cyanogenmod.
I very much prefer Android over iOS, but wished there was at least one decent and secure android mail app which meet my criteria, the way that iOS stock mail app does. Not to mention having the extremely handy in-app file attachment preview of pdf, word, powerpoint, excel, etc. which iOS stock mail app provides.
If any decent Android mail app ever does go on sale, I would be happy to pay up to $100 for it, especially for something close to iOS stock mail app. Since this would be a bargain compared to switching back to iOS just for decent mail.
I take this as a sign that Google is feeling the heat of Microsoft's increasingly competitive mobile apps.
Gmail and Gmail mobile added exchange support shortly after their respective launches. Realistically, they had to. If you want to ultimately convert people from Exchange to Gmail, you have to make everything work together for as long as the user wants. In late 2012, after some squabbling with Microsoft and with confidence that Exchange was on a downward trajectory, they stopped supporting Exchange sync. Exchange and Outlook have been super useful for a long time and they've been maintenance headaches since the beginning. Gmail is mostly caught up in terms of enterprise usability, but they have a mindshare and marketing problem with many businesses. Cutting off free support for Exchange was a strategic way to try to pull more users over to Gmail and cut off Microsoft's free ride on the Android platform.
A year and a half later, Satya Nadella announced that Microsoft is shifting to Mobile-First, Cloud-First. Six months after that, they buy Accompli and turn it into Outlook Mobile. That was the first big salvo. Outlook Mobile is very good. It accomplishes the mission of being the beach-head of Office/365 on Android and makes Microsoft email services competitive on Android. If you add-in Microsoft Next lock screen, it fills a big gap in Android overall usability. I have used a Windows Phone. Its a superior system with an Apps problem. But it does MS Email, Calendar and Office really, really well. Now all of that stuff is working about as well on Android too.*
Google doesn't really have a choice if they want to keep making their services available to users. Plenty of businesses still prefer to use Outlook/Exchange and Google doesn't want to push** users to stop using Gmail to access their work email. Its really valuable for them to keep having people using the Gmail instead of Outlook on Android.
* Yes, there's exchange client alternatives for Android. They cost money and basically still suck.
** You can reach Exchange on Gmail via IMAP. It sucks.
I've been waiting for this for years. Finally, it's announced the week that the company I work at is starting to roll out migrations away from Exchange and into Google Apps.
It's not about exchange, it's about Activesync protocol.
Lots of mail systems support it, such as Zarafa and Novell Groupwise (which provides all of the features Exchange does and more).
The advantage of having it in the GMail app is that you don't have to rely on the build-in version Android, which can be buggy between versions.
And yes, having mail, contacts and calendar data in one program is a must.
No need for Outlook or costly exchange plug-ins for thunderbird. No need for MS Office. This pleases me.