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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.
Are you serious or just trolling? Did you really just come out from under a rock or mom's basement?
You can't possibly think of a reason you'd want something like contact info with email addresses tied into the program you send emails with tied into your calendar so you can send appointment info to people?
Is it really that useful to merge these three ...
Yes, it really is that useful...
You're both right and wrong. .ics files is very useful. However, that could easily be done via an external handler based on mime type. The email program *could* be so kind as to parse that for your and show a nice display of the info.
Having an interface from your email program into your contact management system is very useful. However, as one example, this could just use LDAP.
Having an interface from your email program to accept/deny/reply-to meeting invites sent via
Exchanged doesn't literally merge this data either. It, and its native clients, provide tight integration of these items (mail, contact, calendar), similar to every other groupware item ever created. ...", but that broke). It would be nice if someone made a simple command line tool to do the calendar actions on those attachments, and a wrapper for a GUI version, so that part would all be standard and easily triggered by any mail program.
Personally, I think there should be more standard tools to deal with these standard formats. I primarily use alpine for email, and I wrote my own ics (icalendar) parser to display the contents and shift all the times into my own timezone (which is easily the messiest part of the parsing). I also have it display an option to use gcalcli to import that to my google calendar (I used to use "google calandar add
If you don't see why Exchange integration in apps, I posit that you are not a corporate nor high-volume email, calendar and contacts user. Fact is, Exchange integration is a must for many jobs.
Quite literally a huge majority of the white collar world has decided that Outlook and Exchange is ideal for them, especially given the high quality support for them on popular smartphones.
I have at least 3 Exchange accounts from 3 mail systems open in Outlook at one time and I use them all extensively. I can't imagine the clusterfuck of having three programs to manage this same information.