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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.
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.
When your users you support are only willing to use one product, it's quite useful.
Is it really that useful to merge these three types of data into a single program?
Yes, it really is that useful. For people with white collar jobs, it's incredibly useful, and there are no other products that are nearly as good.
I don't respond to AC's.
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
This sounds as dumb as merging a music player, video player, device manager and online music/video/app store into a single program.
Or even into a single device, right? And what about integrated circuits? Horrible. Who ever thought such a thing could be practical? What's wrong with rectifiers and vacuum tubes that can be tested and bought at Walgreens?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Millennials. Nuff said.
Life is not for the lazy.
I put my email address and username into Outlook.
I don't respond to AC's.
I use three separate programs on my Mac that do all these things just fine and work with each other to do those exact things. I don't see why the all-in-one aspect of Microsoft Exchange is seen as a "must" on a website where people dislike the iMac, systemd, iTunes, etc.
I guess you didn't read "iTunes" as I expected people would. People hate iTunes around here because of the all-in-one aspect.
I think you misunderstand. The calendar data is merged into the calendar app, mail with gmail app.
You use alpine on android. Really.
IMHO, the real failure was for someone to extend the IMAP protocol to handle contacts and calendar items. Maybe the commands and primitives were already suited for this and we just needed some standard format for calendar and contact data types and they could have been saved as messages in folders flagged as containing that kind of data, and then at that point the processing logic is just up to the client to provide interfaces for it.
In other words, if you had a MUA that had calendaring and contact user interfaces, could you have just used IMAP to store that data in the mail store? Or is there some kludgey inefficiency to something like that where it would mean harsh IMAP queries to populate a month view of a calendar or an entire address book?
In my mind the "best tool for the job" mindset kind of made Exchange an easy choice, since Exchange functionality on Unix would have meant LDAP, IMAP, and maybe something else.
If somehow you could have gotten all of this done with a client and an IMAP server (at least for individuals without intra-user shared data) maybe a more open client model would have held on to some of the market because the back-end could have been a single system and not a mashup of a half-dozen different services.
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.
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.
Exchange isn't special. But it is what a lot of big businesses use. Because it was one of the first well known brand system to support Email, Contacts and Calendar info. Back in the day where Microsoft was the cool company. During this time having a unified app vs common protocols were popular.
Being that migrating off Exchange is a bitch, most companies will just keep it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Programs talking with a standard set of protocols work just as well.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
POP? Who the hell still rolls out POP? The default for Exchange has been MAPI forever...
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.
Really? I did not know that. I always thought it was because it's so locked into Apple's format and kinda clunky.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
When your users you support are only willing to use one product, it's quite useful.
If you're working in the sort of environment that's likely to be using Exchange, your users shouldn't be dictating software policy.
#DeleteChrome
Are you serious or just trolling? Did you really just come out from under a rock or mom's basement?
You should't assume everyone here is old enough to have experience in a workplace.
#DeleteChrome
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.
That's failing to address what Exchange is. Outlook is the client, end-user experience and that is what merges e-mail/contacts/calendar data. Outlook is a reasonable mail client but not in and of itself indispensable.
Exchange is a server product that Outlook can optionally connect to, and it enables exchange of data. More than the obvious e-mail exchange user-to-user, it handles all the expected bonus features like user groups, forwarding, out-of-office messages (server-side, not client-side). It's handles device sync much, much better than IMAP can. It comes with a web portal. You can also make "public folders", containing things like shared calendars, shared contact lists, and shared mailboxes, allowing users to exchange useful information of those types. More, Outlook really starts to shine in an Exchange environment, enabling slick handling of things like meeting invites. You can make special "resource or room" mailboxes for things like boardrooms, and users can schedule meetings with those resources, and see free/busy availability and so on. You can delegate user access to all the various types of data it handles, allowing teamwork.
That's a summary. But really, it's sort of "why would anyone use an SQL database when there's flat text files?" If all you're doing is quick notes, text files are fine. If on the other hand you're looking to do something more complicated, SQL is a huge difference. Well, Outlook as a mail client is... ok. But as a client to Exchange, for businesses that can use group scheduling or contacts or delegation or shared anything, it's almost completely without peer.
"Oh no... he found the
(Are you listening Verizon? Oh, of course not.)
They can't hear you now.
#DeleteChrome
Maybe this person does not know what Exchange is. I didn't, so I came here to learn.
I thought this was News For Nerds.
How can you not know what Exchange is? It is literally the most dominant on-premise groupware server and has been for at least a decade and more or less in its same format has been available since the 1990s.
I might expect you to not know what Groupwise or Lotus Notes were, but Exchange?
However, in our current world of grey-area smartphone data ownership (corporate/personal), it's nice to have more options like allowing users to connect with the GMail app. The days of have a corporate *and* personal phone are going the way of the dodo.
Maybe this person does not know what Exchange is.
Using your own rationale, a person who knows nothing of Exchange shouldn't be shooting off their mouth about it in the first comment. This isn't Kindergarten, you're expected to be exposed to technical content on a technical site.
No, but a 30-second Google search on "what is Exchange" should be well within the capacity of anyone, even without any work experience and especially for someone who feels the need to make the first comment. One might argue that it actually wastes everyone's time.
I suppose you could easily have a calendar device a contacts gadget and a portable email system and a phone. After all, what is the possible advantage of centralizing these vastly different data systems into one piece of hardware?
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...
Why would a bandwidth heavy standard like IMAP support have saved things? We already have open standards for calendar and contacts, CalDAV and CardDAV respectfully. And there are open source server solutions that implement them, such as Zimbra.
It's really handy if parts of your users' lives are currently private.
Requiem for the American Dream
Bigger question:
Then why the hell are you using your ISP mailbox?
I mean, come on. This is Slashdot. Stump up a pittance, buy a domain name and either forward it to whatever you want (e.g. GMail) or stick a mailbox on it for another pittance.
And then you aren't tied into whatever your ISP wants to give you for email, especially if someday they are bought up, sold off, or just plain decide to stop doing email.
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.
Not everyone has worked in places big enough to run anything Microsoft. All the places I've been have used either Mac OS, Mac OS X or Linux/BSD.
There was one guy who ran some flavour of Windows that was needed for some CAD program but that's about it.
AAC is not "Apple's format" nor has it been locked for years.
The idea is that popular adoption of an easy open source solution didn't happen because of the division of all those items into multiple data types requiring multiple back end services to be installed.
If they all had been usable through a single server instance, maybe an open source alternative to Exchange circa 2000 would have blunted its momentum. I think despite the so-called complexity of an Exchange install, it offered a fairly easy to install, "single server" solution for mail/calendar/contacts that free open source alternatives couldn't match, especially 15 years ago when an equivalent server-side storage solution would have mattered.
Most of that now has been ceded to Exchange and more recently to web/cloud services now. Zimbra seems like an also-ran solution at this point, although I have no experience with it and have no idea how good it is or how useful its free product is.
No need for Outlook or costly exchange plug-ins for thunderbird. No need for MS Office. This pleases me.
I'm fairly certain you are mashing up and confusing the facts here.
When someone sends a meeting invite via outlook through an exchange server, the recipients receive an email with a text/calendar type attachment, and it's just an iCalendar file, which is a standard format attachment.
The only reason outlook users see a different interface in their client when the get one of these is because the outlook client detects that attachment type and handles it specially. Any other client can do the same thing, or they could allow you to open it in an external app (which is what I do).
Contacts for exchange are accessible via the standard LDAP protocol. All other clients can use this as well, and most do support this.
Shoehorning calendaring and contacts into IMAP would NOT be a good idea. We already have very well established standards, and making a client that can talk those protocols has already been done many times over. Exchange isn't popular because of the protocol; it's popular in spite of its proprietary protocol.
BTW, there are also standards for storing other data in IMAP. Pine/Alpine has used them for ages, and can store the config itself, as well as contacts, on any IMAP server. I'm 99% sure that support was there before exchange existed.
My thought was that for a single user (ie, minus any of the group/shared functionality of Exchange or other groupware concepts) IMAP wouldn't have been a terrible way to interact with remote data storage.
You get the value of a single server process handling the info, clients not capable of parsing and rendering calendar and contacts could just ignore it (or at least not mangle the data) and if the format was standardized any client could read/cache/interpret it/present it to the user, providing you with an easy way to have the same kind of stored-on-the-server functionality you get for email for calendar data and contact info.
My thought was that for a single user (ie, minus any of the group/shared functionality of Exchange or other groupware concepts) IMAP wouldn't have been a terrible way to interact with remote data storage.
It's been done. It was done long ago. It did not blunt the momentum of other solutions.
Here's the docs for Pine's remote address book, as one implementation: https://www.washington.edu/pin...
Here's a huge list of ways to share/copy/sync/etc address books to/from Thunderbird: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Shar...
The ones that won for address books are LDAP and CardDAV.
Calendaring is quite different and separate from email, except in sending/receiving invites, so it's always a separate system. The invite stuff is solved with CalDAV and/or iCalendar.