Over the weekend, I bought a Motorola Droid, a great new Android 2.0 phone on the Verizon network. It's important to note that this is not only my first smart phone, but also my first hand-held device of this type (i.e., a PDA, etc), so I'm pretty stoked at the moment.
The device synchronizes with Google applications extremely well (like GMail, Google Calendars, Google Voice, Contacts, etc). Setting this up is just a matter of creating a new Account on the phone, providing your GMail account and password, and then everything else just magically syncs. And, since I'm primarily a GMail user (who uses multiple Google Calendars to keep our hectic family schedule organized), this was a killer feature for me.
But, I expect that this would be easy for Google content. What about the real world? What about synchronizing to an enterprise email and calendar, like Exchange? And, since I'm a consultant, what about synchronizing to multiple Exchange servers at the same time?
Well, I'm happy to report that there's an application for that... Or, rather, a couple of them: Email (note, not the GMail app) and Corporate Calendar.
My company uses Lotus Notes for email. Thankfully, though, our Microsoft Practice within the company has just started to use Exchange Online (as part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite, or BPOS), so mail sent to my company account gets forwarded to the Exchange Online server.
Configuring the Droid to synchronize with Exchange Online is probably not much different than synchronizing with any Exchange server. It all starts with creating a new Account on the Droid:
- From the Settings application, touch "Accounts & sync".
- Touch the "Add account" button at the bottom
- Choose "Corporate" as the type of account to create.
- You'll be prompted for a Email Address and Password. Enter the same email account and password that you use to log into BPOS, and then touch the "Next" button.
- The next page is where it tried to be smart about what you entered on the previous page. Basically, only the Password will be correct (at least in my case).
- Replace the Domain\Username with the same email that you entered on the previous screen. It's okay to have the backslash as the first character.
- For the Exchange server, refer to the Mobile Device URLs for your region that are listed on the "URLs for Microsoft Online Services" page. For my account, I had to specify: red001.mail.microsoftonline.com
- I also have "Use secure connections (SSL)" and "Accept all SSL certificates" checked.
- Click Next to go the the Account Options screen.
- Set the "Email checking frequency" and "Amount to synchronize". I used Automatic (Push) and One week, respectively.
- You can also choose to "Send email from this account by default" (I don't), "Notify me when email arrives" (I do), and "Sync contacts from this account" (I do).
- Click Next to go to the final screen. Give the account a friendly name, and enter your name (to be displayed on outgoing email). Then touch the "Done" button.
By default, it doesn't seem that Calendar sync'ing is automatically added to a new account. I had to go into the Corporate Calendar app, after which it detected the new Corporate Account and started sync'ing the calendar (which can be verified by opening the account information from Settings).
Also, I'm sure that this is a bug at the moment, but it seems that only one Corporate Account (only the first one) is able to synchronize its calendar. That is, the Corporate Calendar application does not seem to recognize when additional Corporate Accounts are added. As a test, I deleted my first Corporate Account and then started the Corporate Calendar again, at which time it detected a new account (which was originally the second account) and added the Calendar sync to that. But, recreating the original first account didn't result in an automatic Calendar sync. Definite weirdness!