At work we use a Microsoft Exchange server for all email. It’s a stable email server and the Microsoft Outlook client has a really polished UI. The 3rd party extensions aren’t as mature (IMHO) as the Thunderbird extensions, but the Calendar integration is pretty top notch.
I try to keep all my calendar events using the Exchange calendar system because it’s so easy to use. And I have integrated the Exchange Calendar with Google Calendar in order to have easy access to the system from home. The Google Calendar Sync service does a pretty good job of providing synchronization, but I’ve seen it miss a few appointments/meetings here and there. For the most part, it’s accurate and efficient.
Recently, I got an iPhone and have been blown away by the integration and accuracy. I haven’t been using the iPhone as long as the Google Calendar Sync; so this might be a premature evaluation.
However, I have found a couple of the features to be really compelling.
First, the easiness of adding my email account to the iPhone was amazing. Of course I had to put in my email address & password. But, here was the great part: To hook up the phone to the web interface of Exchange meant 1) entering the domain name that the Exchange server was on (eg. somedomain.com) and then 2) click “Next”. The phone searched the domain network for a web access point and returned with the correct dns information (eg. webmail.somedomain.com). That was it.
Second, I’ve compared the iPhone’s calendar with my Google Calendar and the iPhone caught all of the appointments/meetings which the Google Calendar missed.
Third, the iPhone is actually receiving emails a few seconds before the Outlook client on my work computer is. And, the Calendar is automatically being updated when the email arrives.
A Big THANK YOU to the iPhone designers for making this such an easy process!
The other phone I was considering was the Google phone. Does anyone have experience with that phone? How does the email/calendar integration on the G1 compare with the iPhone email/calendar integration?
1 comments:
Thank your exchange admin for that little autoconfiguration of the iphone. The iphone did little searching, all it did was follow the exchange active sync specs and looked on a special URL that your admin setup to get all its configuration information.
Happy activesyncing, or iphoning of whatever :)
Post a Comment