How well does your smartphone support your Exchange server?
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Most every phone with an Exchange client can give you email, calendar, and contacts, and task syncing, along with push email support. I need my smartphone to go beyond the basics in a few areas and I evaluate the mobile clients based on the following functionality:
- Global Address Lookup (GAL) support
- Search the server for email
- Create private appointments
- Create meetings where server contacts can be added
- Respond and reply to meeting requests
Let me explain why a few of these are important to me. I do not sync up all of my contacts in my personal contacts list and find using GAL to be necessary to contact my coworkers from time-to-time. I also sync my email back a week on my devices, but need to often find email that is much older than what is synced to my device. We share our calendars at work so that appointments can be made and people know who is in or out, which is vital to the team approach we take to our various projects. Thus, I need to create private appointments so that everyone doesn't see my podcast recording, family birthday plans, etc. on the company calendar. I also meet with my project teams and like to setup meetings when out of the office. Since we don't have Outlook access outside the office, except through VPN or OWA, I like when my phone can be used to schedule these appointments.
So how do all the current mobile operating systems stack up for supporting these functions:
- Windows Mobile supports all of these functions and more.
- The iPhone 3.0 OS update added some great support for the enterprise user and now supports all of these functions, except for private appointment creation. I looked everywhere and did not see this capability on my iPhone 3G S, but as soon as it is added then I won't need to have a Windows Mobile phone to get all the Exchange functionality I need. The iPhone also presents this functionality in a nicer, more user friendly fashion. The iPhone also does not support Task synchronization.
- Mail For Exchange on the Nokia N97 supports GAL, private meeting creation, and respond/reply to meeting requests. You cannot search the server (DataViz RoadSync does support this though) or create meetings with attendees. MFE also supports Task syncing, within the Calendar application.
- With the excellent Touchdown application on my T-Mobile G1 I can actually perform a few of these advanced functions, with private appointments and server search missing. The latest version of Touchdown supports Task synchronization too.
- The Palm Pre, like the iPhone, has native support for Exchange. However, Exchange support is slightly more limited on the Pre with no support for private appointments and no meeting creation where you can add attendees. Interestingly though, the Palm Pre is the only device I have ever seen with multiple Exchange account support. I didn't have more than one Exchange account to test this out though so I am not sure how well it works or integrates, but imagine with the Palm Pre color-coded calendars it works just fine.
Support for Microsoft Exchange servers has come a long ways in mobile operating systems and there are just one or two functions (from my particular list) missing from all of them, except for Windows Mobile. I think these issues can be fairly easily addressed by all of these mobile platforms and hope to soon see Exchange functionality not being a deciding factor between choosing a smartphone.
What other functions/capabilities do you need to see from your smartphone when it comes to Exchange server support?