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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.
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.
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.
I've been using Gmail on my Android phone with Office 365 for many months now. Its had Exchange support for just as long. I have no idea what this article thinks is new.
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
I put my email address and username into Outlook.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
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.
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