I took my Droid back.

[cdd543]

I'm on exchange 07 and it was a breeze setting up default exchange, but touchdown rocks so that's what I use as my default client. Touchdown is totally worth the $10 it cost me. If you want top down folder access like a blackberry on BES provides, then get TD.

 

[MSU]

When I first got my Droid, my IT guy told me that I could not get into exchange since he only had BES and was blocking the rest. I talked to another guy I know that has a droid and he was syncing 3 exchange accounts. I put in all my info and bam I was syncing with exchange it it works perfect with my calender, contacts and email. Now there is a guy with 1.5 that can not get in and I was told you can only get in using 2.0?
We do have web access to the exchange server so I'm wondering if I'm using that? All I know is that it works.

For me it was a matter of typing in the info correctly while setting up the account on my droid.

 

[QrafTee]

I'm even more baffled by all the responses that say it's easy to do. That frustrates me even more. I'm glad things worked for you guys, and I wish they worked for me. Just trading out the phone with Verizon has hardly been an easy feat. They wanted to charge me a restocking fee for exchanging a phone THEY RECOMMENDED given my requirements. Crazy talk. Ultimately they agreed to change it when I agreed to buy more phones if we could ever find one that woudl work with our exchange.

I wish I was more knowledgeable and could carry out some of the fixes you guys have suggested. Thanks again for everyone's help. Enjoy your new phone... it's truly a cool device.

Actually a restocking fee is sound considering their recommendation was spot-on and your IT guy couldn't get it to work. It would have been your IT guy's fault, not Verizon's and a restocking fee would have been warranted. I'm glad you talked them out of it though because I think restocking fees itself is a scam no matter where you go.

 

[ParadingLunatic]

I'm one of the Network Admins for my company and my Droid syncs with Exchange perfectly. We were running on Exchange 2003 and recently went to Exchange 2007 and using a wildcard certificate which is one reason why I had to replace my old Motorola Q (the main reason is because it was old and is a piece of crap). Windows Mobile 5 Activesync is not compatible with a wildcard certificate. That being said, there are a few things that can keep a Droid from connecting to Exchange but not the iPhone or other Windows Mobile phones. One of THE BIGGEST reasons the Droid will not connect to Activesync has to do with a activesync policy configuration on the Exchange server. Basically it has something to do with password provisioning the device or something to that extent. In fact, here's a link from Verizon that is directly associated to this issue. I did a lot of research prior to purchasing the Droid to make sure I could prepare our Exchange environment to support it. The problem is that a lot of people make the changes to their Activesync policies because it does increase security. Problem is, the Droid isn't yet compatible with these settings. Keep in mind the Droid is basically running what is still a Beta OS. Sure this phone was released to the public with it and technically they SHOULD have told people that Android 2.0 isn't technically RTM, but what's done is done. I use the phone knowing it's technically beta and I'll run into bugs. So for those of you out there still unable to sync exchange with your Droid...have your IT folk remove device password settings in the Activesync profile. This can even be set per user account if your IT folk don't want to set it as default.

 

[Puddinhead]

Thanks... I'll send this to my IT guy. I'd still like to keep this phone and cancel my order. (I assume they'd prefer I keep this phone, too, since it's been opened and used.)

We're using 2003. I thought it was 2007... but I was wrong.

My account is showing up under mail AND contacts with a blue sidebar (?) but no information is being sent to the phone. I cannot send outgoing either. It just sits in the outbox drafts. I've tried tons of combinations under "Settings" and that's (set up with no info in the blank account) the closest I can get to it working.

ALSO... I downloaded Touchdown's trial. NO LUCK!!! Touchdown opens and has my account infor in it, but there's no mail or contacts in it either.

Ideas there? Thanks as always to you all.

 

[avongil]

Sorry it didn't work for you. My works great with Exchange 2007. All I did was enter the server name, username and pass and it works.


If you get another phone, maybe someone can help you via a Skype call or something.

 

[lemodular]

The first time I tried to set up my account, I entered my email name as my user and got no sync, I then tried my computer logon name (to the server) instead and it sync'd right away. I should have know since it asked for my domain user name.

 

[boatman]

Even though this is a 'took my droid back thread, it has turned into an exchange thread, so might as well post my question here as it seems like lots of expertise.

I use outlook via pop, not exchange. I need to sync contacts and calendar to phone. Coming from treo/bb/winmo, which did this seamlessly.

Lots of talk on hofo about some products coming out shortly to do so. (Do not tell me to sync via gmail, via import export etc. I need this to sync on several x a day basis).

In the meantime, I set up a hosted exchange account. Figured if droid syncs via exchange, ok, i will pay $10/mo until other solutions available.

My outlook pst file is 5G. Yes i keep everything, and need everything.

I pared it down to 1.5G to test a hosted exchange.

When I set this up on the droid, will the whole 1.5G come over, or can I specify what I want. I do not want to use up 1.5G of my 5G bandwith allocated for the month on just syncing, nor do I really need that much mail on my phone. Thanks.

 

[TeamGLW]

Well I took my Droid back today and got a new one. I really didn't want to do this since my phone was working great other than the screen was very loose. It was way too easy to slide open and loose. I just didn't have really any other problems other than a little static in the ear piece while talking.

The new phone is way better. Not sure if it will loosen up but the first phone was real sloppy after 1 week and drove me nuts. I was worried about getting a lemon for the replacement but seems to be working well and a little less static too.

I did keep the battery since it was working very well.

My original phone was a 41/09 and this one is a 42/09

 

[ParadingLunatic]

Even though this is a 'took my droid back thread, it has turned into an exchange thread, so might as well post my question here as it seems like lots of expertise.

I use outlook via pop, not exchange. I need to sync contacts and calendar to phone. Coming from treo/bb/winmo, which did this seamlessly.

Lots of talk on hofo about some products coming out shortly to do so. (Do not tell me to sync via gmail, via import export etc. I need this to sync on several x a day basis).

In the meantime, I set up a hosted exchange account. Figured if droid syncs via exchange, ok, i will pay $10/mo until other solutions available.

My outlook pst file is 5G. Yes i keep everything, and need everything.

I pared it down to 1.5G to test a hosted exchange.

When I set this up on the droid, will the whole 1.5G come over, or can I specify what I want. I do not want to use up 1.5G of my 5G bandwith allocated for the month on just syncing, nor do I really need that much mail on my phone. Thanks.

Ok to basically answer your question since I'm using the droid to do it, the most you can view of exchange email is 1 month unfortunately. Not sure if this will ever change

 

[boatman]

Interesting. So you are saying that when I put the account up on my droid, when it syncs, only 1 month of the 3 yrs of data I have on the server will come over?

 

[ParadingLunatic]

Exactly. You can open a menu option that will allow you to change the age of data you can sync. One month is the current max.

 

[colnago]

Interesting. So you are saying that when I put the account up on my droid, when it syncs, only 1 month of the 3 yrs of data I have on the server will come over?

I don't remember how the default POP3 client works, but with K-9 Mail, if you scroll down to the last message in your inbox, and there is an area where you can press that says, "Load up to x more messages". You can define different amounts of messages to pull down at one time...right now, 100 is the max, but you can keep going with it, eventually pulling down your entire message store. It may not fit all your 5G, but until we can get the phone to start moving message stores to the storage card (Dec. 11th update?) I'd keep checking your storage levels as you import additional messages.

K-9 Mail will give you many more options in managing your POP/IMAP account, and doesn't seem to suffer from random sync issues. You will however have to confirm you "all" of your account/folder/phone sync settings, to make sure its working the way you want.

 

[cdd543]

Thanks... I'll send this to my IT guy. I'd still like to keep this phone and cancel my order. (I assume they'd prefer I keep this phone, too, since it's been opened and used.)

We're using 2003. I thought it was 2007... but I was wrong.

My account is showing up under mail AND contacts with a blue sidebar (?) but no information is being sent to the phone. I cannot send outgoing either. It just sits in the outbox drafts. I've tried tons of combinations under "Settings" and that's (set up with no info in the blank account) the closest I can get to it working.

ALSO... I downloaded Touchdown's trial. NO LUCK!!! Touchdown opens and has my account infor in it, but there's no mail or contacts in it either.

Ideas there? Thanks as always to you all.

So assuming your IT has your activesync access enabled, you have 4 pieces of vital info your device needs.
1. User name
2. Password
3. domain
4. server address

Using touchdown your login id could combine domain and user name: domain\username
After making sure that piece is correct, check your connection settings and try toggling it to exchange 2003..then activesync if that doesn't work.

 

[ParadingLunatic]

I don't remember how the default POP3 client works, but with K-9 Mail, if you scroll down to the last message in your inbox, and there is an area where you can press that says, "Load up to x more messages". You can define different amounts of messages to pull down at one time...right now, 100 is the max, but you can keep going with it, eventually pulling down your entire message store. It may not fit all your 5G, but until we can get the phone to start moving message stores to the storage card (Dec. 11th update?) I'd keep checking your storage levels as you import additional messages.

K-9 Mail will give you many more options in managing your POP/IMAP account, and doesn't seem to suffer from random sync issues. You will however have to confirm you "all" of your account/folder/phone sync settings, to make sure its working the way you want.

Ahhh that's right. I overlooked that he was accessing via POP. So to verify what I was mentiong about a month limit, that was with Exchange Activesync, not with POP. I haven't used POP with the Droid yet so I'm unsure as to the limits it has with that.

 

[ParadingLunatic]

So assuming your IT has your activesync access enabled, you have 4 pieces of vital info your device needs.
1. User name
2. Password
3. domain
4. server address

Using touchdown your login id could combine domain and user name: domain\username
After making sure that piece is correct, check your connection settings and try toggling it to exchange 2003..then activesync if that doesn't work.

Also I'm guessing this is the case for Touchdown as well, for "Exchange Server" under the standard Droid exchange/corporate/activesync config or "server address", make sure you're using the fully qualified domain name/web address for your webmail server.

For example, lets say my domain at work is called "Foo.local" and my username is jsmith but the address to access my webmail from home would be webmail.foo.com. So in the standard Droid configuration I would plug it in like this
Domain\Username=Foo.local\jsmith
Password=(whatever my password is to login to my computer at work)
Exchange Server = webmail.foo.com

Also our webmail server requires SSL connections (https). If yours requires it (which Exchange 2007 does) be sure to check the SSL connection and also the accept any certificate box. Hopefully this helps everyone. The first time I tried to connect to my email with the Droid I took the "Exchange Server" too literally and put in the actual mail server name. Yeah, that would never work.

 

[boatman]

we should rename this thread to 'email problems' ;-)

 

[Doowron]

Hi everyone. New to forum and love so much about my new Droid. I was a heavy BB user with about 125 email/day through a corporate exchange server and personal email on POP through BB servers. I am now a small biz owner without the mothership paying for an exchange server...I have spent countless hours, like many others, trying to find the best way to replicate what BB does seamlessly. I finally have set up, and paid for Google Apps ($50/yr), and am not crazy about the way it performs. The phone has so many awsome features that it breaks my heart to think about returning it but I can't seem to get it to replicate the inherent email capabilities BB has. I am really on the fence here...any advice?

 

[boatman]

Doowon,
I took was a have BB user, though BIS, never with exchange. Own a small biz, all of us get mail via pop using outlook.
With droid, here are the following options I have found.
a)your mail hosting site probably offers excahnge hosting for about $10/mo. My hosting company allows for a mix of pop and exchange, so if only a few want exchange, the rest can use pop. So you can set yourself up on exchange and droid does this fairly well.
b) i set up a forward for a pop account just for droid. That way I have my outlook getting messages and my droid as well. They are not sync'd, i just don't lose anything and have duplicates on both. If this is not good, you need exchange.
c)k-9 mail seems to work great for pops.
d)what i miss right now is that my outlook contacts, calendar and to do don't sync to the droid. There are a few apps coming out next month that promise to do this. You can do this via gmail sync, but it's cumbersome.

Bottom line is that if you are dependent upon your phone for email, instantly, the droid doesn't cut it unless you can use gmail. That is not an option for me, but then again I am not wholly dependent upon email.

In every other category, the droid beats the BB IMHO.

 

[mswhite60]

My company has Exchange 2003 and the Droid cannot hook up to it at all without Touchdown. The issue for us is "forms-based authentication". Touchdown, however, does the job nicely. I get mail, calendar and contacts (I have 1600 contacts) synced. Love it.

-Matt

 

[Maverick0984]

I am the IT administrator of my small business and have a Droid working perfectly fine.

What you DO need that is different than ActiveSync and Windows Mobile syncing of exchange is to have OWA working 100% and on default ports, SSL or not, works both ways.

If you don't have OWA set up correctly, then it won't work correctly. I think this is a case of your Exchange Server not being set up properly, and not the Droid or Android for that matter.

Just my $.02.

 

[TechLess]

I have wanted to buy the Droid but have been on the sidelines watching. Reading about the email problems people are having and the way it has to be set up, I to, do not want my info from Outlook on the web. I sync my Treo with a PC now but need to replace it. I did find this https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/17372 in the Motorola forum that offers some hope. But besides that; now I read that the Droid is deleting emails. Google “Trouble with Droid” and get the story. Like any new devise, there are bugs. I want to stay with Verizon but keep getting pushed to iPhone. I am going to wait it out; my Treo is giving me trouble but not as bad as what I read about the Droid email issues so I wait; although it is my first choose.

 

[Barbara]

I have wanted to buy the Droid but have been on the sidelines watching. Reading about the email problems people are having and the way it has to be set up, I to, do not want my info from Outlook on the web. I sync my Treo with a PC now but need to replace it. I did find this https://supportforums.motorola.com/thread/17372 in the Motorola forum that offers some hope. But besides that; now I read that the Droid is deleting emails. Google

 

[SirVilhelm]

I just wanted to pop in and say I LOVE TouchDown for Exchange. I tried using the built in Exchange support but I like things like being able to schedule when I poll for new email. I turn off scheduling for the weekend so I can escape work for two days.

I run Exchange 2007 w/ wildcard cert with no issues.

@billd I'm so glad that I don't use Exchange.

Why? Exchange is wonderful. Before the I got the Droid thats how I managed to keep my contacts in sync between all my devices.

@oceanlight i'm told exchange servers are crazy complicated. even some seasoned pro network-admins don't know all the ins and outs of all the settings.

That's funny, if you admin Exchange you BETTER know the ins n out! It would really suck to have a corrupt Exchange data store for a fortune 500 company without knowing how to get it back up and running!

@ParadingLunatic I'm one of the Network Admins for my company and my Droid syncs with Exchange perfectly. We were running on Exchange 2003 and recently went to Exchange 2007 and using a wildcard certificate which is one reason why I had to replace my old Motorola...

Not that this matters but there was a reg hack for WinMo 5.0 that allowed wildcard certs. We had to train our Desktop team on how to hack the phone so they could get our users up and running.


I also want to echo that VZW does not charge extra for Exchange syncing. They do however charge extra for Good Messaging support.

 

[esmith818]

One of THE BIGGEST reasons the Droid will not connect to Activesync has to do with a activesync policy configuration on the Exchange server. Basically it has something to do with password provisioning the device or something to that extent.

+1

My company apparently had a security setting in place on our Exchange server that required an employee's handset to have a password-protected lock screen to prevent access to company information on the phone should it be lost/stolen. The symbol lock interface on Android 2.0 does not qualify and nothing else is offered.

In the end, the owner of the company (who happens to have a Droid) allowed the policy to be changed at the user level for Android users assuming they could show that they were using some form of security and had an app installed to allow for a remote wipe should the phone be lost.

Since that "tweak" has been made to my account, I have had no issues with my Exchange syncing, although I hear the 3rd party app "Touchdown" offers several features not implemented in the OS's interface.