Microsoft Outlook comes to Android, iOS: MS email now a bit less painful on mobile Microsoft has released new Outlook apps for Android and iOS. The apps are based on code acquired with Acompli late last year, and former Acompli CEO Javier Soltero is now Outlook general manager at Microsoft. On iOS it is a full production release, but on Android it is a preview. You can connect to accounts including Exchange …
Attachments blow goats on it. Composing a new mail to multiple individuals is a pain. It doesn't pick up Exchange mailing lists well. Flagging is a pain.
Generally speaking, it's not a bad POP3/IMAP client but it's nowhere near the functionality of Outlook Mail.
My biggest complaint with the standard mail client is on a long email chain on the iPhone 6 regular you have to turn the phone sideways to be able to read the text. The pinch zoom in portrait mode on the client is atrocious too imho.
Oh WP8 well couldn't tell you. Only ever seen one in the wild and the person using it hasn't needed to worry about corporate email for a few decades.
Just to further step on the thread. So far I do like the new Outlook app for iPhone more than the native mail client. For one thing it doesn't display text two small for me to see for more a second or two before auto zooming to good size with a good looking font imho.
Well, my Windows tablet runs the full version of Outlook if I need it. Anyway Mail and Calendar apps are not that bad on a tablet. Mail is still a bit too limited on Windows Phone, especially when it comes to attachments.- thanks to the luser-oriented model they had to adopt to suit late smartphone users (everyboy who discovered smartphones after 2005).
I'm curious about the sub heading, and the premise of the article, we run a couple of Exchange AD domains with a mixture of IOS and Android clients, and I haven't found them to be particularly painful to administer, and users seem happy enough? It's very rare we have problems with the built in mail clients.
The worst culprit for problems is Outlook for Mac, which needs beating with a large wet haddock at every opportunity, it's a PITA.
I just realized that the email app on my phone stopped getting mail from my work account (on Office365) a few days ago. This wouldn't be my first choice to fix it, but it is definitely going onto the bottom of my list of things to try. And, if past experience with this problem on other peoples' phones is any indication, I'll probably get to the bottom of the list. O365 and Android seem to have a touch and go relationship.
No thanks.
In all those years it took you to get here, there's been a whole raft of products that do the same, and they wanted my money, gave me the features, "just work" and have done for years (decades) in some cases.
Exchange accounts are pretty standard on all Android phones and if you want deep integration then things like Touchdown, etc. only cost a few quid. Everything else, well, if you can't do IMAP and SMTP with your email, it's not really an email account.
I can't imagine many people CHOOSE Outlook because its workflow is so much better than all the competition. They choose it because their workplace is Exchange and they want to integrate with it. I've survived all my IT career without Outlook on my desktop, yet I still have every email I've ever sent or received, and I can schedule things on calendars, answer votes, attend meetings, etc. alongside everything else on any platform, at any time.
The time to open this sort of thing up and start providing Office, Outlook, IE (yuck!), etc. on other platforms was about the time you got sued for anti-competitive behaviour in the EU. But at the time, you were too busy turning off my Hotmail so I couldn't collect it with POP3 any more and stuff like that.
It uses ActiveSync (shows up as DeviceUserAgent : Outlook-iOS-Android/1.0 in the Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics for the user).
And *very* annoyingly it knows nothing about the Global Address List, much less any other address lists defined in Exchange. This makes it useless, compared to, say, the built in Mail app in iOS.
Upvoted for mention of Mail+. This is a great app! It has a few limitations so it isn't going to do for someone who is doing tons of mobile email, but for people like me who just want to be able to keep up on emails when I'm away from my laptop and put in a quick reply, it is great.
Surely the only people with any interest in this will be enterprises deeply wedded to Exchange.
But their existing MDM will configure the built-in Mail, Contacts and Calendar apps. They won't be able to use this Outlook connection to remotely enforce security policies or remotely wipe/lock devices through Exchange either. Outlook will be sandboxed like any other app.
Baffling waste of engineering effort just to keep marketing happy.
Last time I tried setting up my phone to talk to the Outlook cloud server, it wanted me to agree that the app could wipe my phone back to a factory reset if it felt like it. So I don't have it on my phone. If my employer wants me to have access, they can provide their own device for it.
WARNING: This is a rebadged Accompli client. All your account details, including passwords are stored on Accompli servers and a cache of your email as well.
Microsoft have confirmed this in several blog comment replies (read the responses) http://blogs.office.com/2015/01/29/deeper-look-outlook-ios-android/
There's also info in there on how corporates can block the client.
If you use this with your exchange work email, for instance, they now have your (plaintext) password.
Nice one, MS.
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