I’m primarily a business user of the Droid; sure I have a few games, but its primary purpose is to be my go-to gadget for all things work.  Phone calls, email and calendars are the three things I use the most.  I think I have a working system on the Droid now, but either Google, Verizon or Motorola owes me $20, not to mention the time I had to spend getting it working.

It all seemed easy enough.  The built in email profiles seemed to work great with my corporate Exchange server.  The corporate calendar application (the standard one that ships with Droid) seemed fairly intuitive.  Being the CIO at work, I had no problems configuring my exchange server address, the domain, login & password.  Setup wasn’t the problem, the problems relate to the poor design and overall lack of continuity of the built in applications.

I first recognized a problem when I went to forward a message someone had sent me to my CEO.  I clicked ‘forward message’ was prompted for a recipient and them wham!  What? The only addresses available to me were those in my contacts, there is no native support for Exchange’s global address list (GAL).  How could it be?  Apple certainly has a leg up in this area.  So off I went looking for a solution.  Motorola had a soft solution called ‘Corporate Directory for Droid’ – so I installed it.  What a poor design, it’s still not integrated with the built-in email, in order to use it you have to start in the Corporate Directory application… it’s quite simply a poor workflow.  Someone should be ashamed of themselves for marketing the Droid as being Exchange friendly for this reason alone.

After working my way through the awkward workflows I encountered something that was more annoying than anything I’d found so far. I went to check my corporate calendar and saw this -

WTF?  I just set that up a few days ago, what happened to my settings?  Off to Google I go.  I must say there wasn’t exactly a shortage of quick hits on this issue – certainly others are experiencing this too.  However, there wasn’t a lot of people complaining about it either.  There were certainly no solutions that I could find, or culprits.  I suspected that some other application I installed had stepped on the Exchange settings, so I simply punched in all of the account information and off I went again.  Then two days later… the same things.  All right, god damned it, what the frick is going on?  I uninstalled all of the 3rd party applications, reset the exchange settings and was once again working with my kludged workflows to perform my job.  All the while I was beginning to wonder why I gave up my iPhone.  It only took one day before my settings magically disappeared one more time.

Along with these problems I also discovered the following issues with the Droid <=> Exchange applications:

• Email synchronization (at least the initial sync) was almost non-existent until I was on a wireless network – it seems even a good 3G connection couldn’t get the sync started.  (I have not tested this theory).
• After a while, it seems that email synchronization just stops working for no reason – until you reboot the device.
• I never found a way to sync sub-folders or other folders with the native tools (though I didn’t try too hard).
• I couldn’t add attachments other than pictures.
• I couldn’t accept a meeting invitation from within the email application, I had to go to the corporate calendar.

This is clearly not going to work well for an enterprise solution.  As I work for about 200 physicians, I have the unique opportunity to provide critical guidance on such things as cell phones, browsers, operating systems, etc.  About 8 or 9 years ago I published something about the ipaq’s (PDA) and I think we had about 100 orders within days.  I’d like nothing more to announce to all staff that Android / Droid is the midwest’s iPhone (as our AT&T service here sucks).  But the aforementioned problems keep me from sending that message.

Earlier today I located a 3rd party application that purports to have a solid exchange <=> droid solution.  Nitrodesk’s Touchdown for Android 2.0 seems to be living up to their marketing hype.  They offer a 5 day trial, but the full blown application costs $19.99 through the android market.  While it’s been less than a day, it seems to be working significantly better than the native solutions.  The rest of this blog entry will concentrate on their solution.

Droid users beware—there are several Touchdown application, when you search for it in the market, make sure you use “touchdown” as your search string.  Search will result several application – get the right one downloaded first:

For as nice as this application is, I did have a number of issues getting it configured the first time.  In fact at one point it completely rebooted the Droid.  But after some trial and error, I did get the configuration right.  At my work we use Exchange 2007 with ActiveSync and SSL.  The rest of this post will concentrate on what I had to do to get Touchdown to work in that kind of environment.  Should you have different environments and manage to get Touchdown working, get hold of me and I’ll be happy to post your steps here too.

When you first fire up Touchdown you’ll need to accept the license terms (twice), then you’ll need to click the icon that looks like a gear (setup)…. if you don’t see it, make sure your phone is in portrait mode.

By the way, if this is your first go at installing Touchdown, your screen won’t say “License is valid” – mine does because I ultimately purchased it.  Once you click the setup gear, you’ll be prompted to perform a “quick configure”.  I tried this several times, and it never worked for me.  So, if your environment is similar to mine, you may want to just skip the “quick configure” step.

The next screen required four changes:

1) Make sure to add your domain name to your login ID – ( mydomain\myloginid) and don’t forget that backslash with no spaces.

2) your full email address

3) you password

4) change the default language from dutch to whatever it is you do speak.

After you double and triple checked those four items, simply save then click to the “connection” settings screen:

On the “Connection” setting screen you need to enter the server name of your Exchange server.  For us this is the same address we use to get outlook web access.  If you don’t know your Exchange server’s address, get hold of your friendly MIS / IT department at work and ask for it.  After you fill out the server name, click “save” – if you got anything wrong, this is when Touchdown will let you know.  Next go to the “Advanced Settings”

On the “Advanced” settings screen I made the following adjustments:

1. Enabled Push (rather than Polling for new messages ever xx minutes)
2. Increased my message history to 30 days
3. Got rid of the default signature line
4. Enabled “Update contact changes to Phone”
5. Enabled “Enable contact syncing with Google”

If you continue to scroll to the bottom of the advanced settings screen you’ll finally see where you can set which folders you want to synchronize.  I had a ton of different folders I rarely use, so I simply chose the ones I wanted to sync.  Just click the “Chose Folders” button, select your Exchange folders you want and then click “Ok”, then “Save”, then “close”

After the setup, I needed to click the “refresh” button from main application screen (it shows up after you hit the menu button on the bottom of the phone). 

After a few minutes everything seemed to be synced properly.  The application itself is fairly intuitive, so I leave that up to you.  Good luck.  If you end up going this route let me know, I’d be curious to hear about your experiences.

And if you ever get the $20 out of Google, Verizon or Motorola – let me know! Join the forum discussion on this post – (1) Posts