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

Before I begin, let me give you a little background.  There are several android applications that purport to provide screen capture services.  Both Screen Capture by Alexandre Thiel and drocap2 for root users require “root device” access in order to operate.  Acquiring “root device” access is a technical procedure to get security clearance that exposes certain aspects of the Android operating system that Google did not intend to make readily available to the average user.  I’m not a fan of such procedures, it reminds me of jailbraking an iPhone -  I guess I’m just not quite that geeky.  If you are interested I did find this guide to ‘rooting your android G1’ – it looks too scary for me, plus it’s not for Android 2.0.  Additionally, dxtop home alternative offers a $2.99 application that does quite a few things including screen capture.  However when I tested it, it could not capture screens while I was placing calls – so I gave up on it.  I imagine that someone soon will create an application to get screen captures that works without rooting your phone and that will allow capture of all the screens (including phone calls).  At the end of the day I proceeded with a Google supported method that leverages their SDK (software development kit), this guide will describe this method.  Giving credit where credit is due, I got started by trying to follow this guide – however the author has the first two steps out of order.  Unfortunately, it took me hours to figure this out.  So, here’s the guide.

Let’s start with the stuff you need to do on the Droid itself.  Perform the following before connecting the USB cable to your computer.

Now let’s load some software on your PC.

First you’re going to need the Android SDK. You can download it from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html.  I’m using Vista, the documentation indicates that only XP and Vista are supported –  I don’t know what to tell you if you’re using Windows 7.  I grabbed the following:

Save the file to the directory of your choice.

Unzip the contents to the directory of your choice.

Find the unzipped files and run “SKD Setup”

For the next step, I found it necessary to close my browser (otherwise one of the components failed – I’m not 100% sure it was due to the open browser, but closing it seemed to help me).  When you run ‘SDK setup’ do the following:

Sit back, grab a beer, play a game… it’s going to take about 15 minutes to complete the installation (at least it took that long for me – I have a 20Mb cable connection).  After this process completes, go ahead and quit out of the SDK setup application.

The next thing you’re going to need is copy of the Java SE Development Kit (JDK).  Java is the platform for Android, so this makes sense.  You can get your copy at http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp

I chose the following package:

Next they’ll ask you to fill out their form with your name, email, etc., but there is an option to skip it… I did.  A new browser window will popup asking for your platform and language, fill it out according to your needs then click “continue”:

Next you will receive a new window identifying the required files for your install.  Check the box(es) next to the files and either click “Download Selected with Sun Download Manager” (which will require downloading and installing their download manager software) or simply click the file name and get it the old fashioned way:

Next chose to “Run” the application:

Is your beer gone?  If not, this is a good time to finish it or get another one.  It took me about 12 minutes to download and install this package.  BTW.. I just took all of the default settings to install the Sun JDK package (sorry, no screen shots).

Now according to Google your system is not quite ready for development until you get yet another set of tools for developers.  They recommend using a package called Eclipse.  However, for simple screen capture, this is not required so I’m skipping this step.

Now we’re ready to install the USB drivers for the Droid.  This is where I got confused.  Since the Droid is a multifunctional device, you’ll see a number of places in your device manager that relate to the Droid.  The fact of the matter is that after you set the Droid for “USB debugging” Windows won’t even load the required driver for development purposes.  When you installed the Google SDK it placed the driver files in one of its folders.  You’ll find them in the folder you unzipped the Google SDK in earlier.  Before you continue, make sure you know where these are.  It’ll look something like:

Next up—install the driver. Plug your Droid into your USB cable.  If you’re running Vista you’ll get a popup, choose to locate the driver:

Windows Vista will try to locate the drives auto-magically, but in the end it will present you with another popup – select “I don’t have the disk, show me other options”.

On the next popup, select “Browse my computer for driver software”

Next click the the “browse” button:

Navigate to the location of your Google Android SDK folder and click the folder named “USB_Driver”, then click “OK”:

Once you’ve located the proper folder, click “Next”:

Now on my system, I received a warning that the driver couldn’t be verified by Microsoft.  But I trust Google, so I selected to install it anyway (I don’t know if you’ll get this warning or not).

After a few seconds I received a message in the Vista tray that the new hardware was properly installed.

Now the fun begins (finally).  In order to capture the screen of your Droid, you need to run a program called “ddms”, it’s located in the “tools” folder of the Google Android SDK folder (just double click it):

Once you start the application, two windows will open: a windows command window (the black one) and the “Dalvik Debug Monitor”:

Just ignore the Windows command window (but don’t close it) – minimize it if you want.

From Dalvik Debug Monitor simply select Device / Screen Capture to get whatever is currently being seen on your Droid:

You’ll get a new window where you can copy the image to your windows clipboard and do whatever you want with it:

So there you have it.  Now you can perform screen captures from any screen on the Droid.  This will be a handy tool for me for this blog – I hope it helps someone.

BTW, I’ve read there is some software available to augment this process that will display 6 frames per second of the Droid screens so you can perform demonstrations (via a projector / web cast / etc.) on an actual Droid rather than using some sort of emulator.  If I have time, I’ll figure this out and post another how-to later.  Cheers! Join the forum discussion on this post – (1) Posts

About a week ago I gave up on AT&T.  Here in Ames, Iowa the signal was poor in my home office, my office and on most of my most common driving routes.  In giving up AT&T, I gave up on Apple.  I sold my iPhone (and my wife’s) on ebay just yesterday.  Deciding on a replacement phone was really a no-brainer – Droid it would be.  First I went to our local BestBuy and being highly irritable, left after talking to some nitwitted teenager who worked there.  I wanted to get the $100 instant rebate BestBuy offered on the Droid, but couldn’t tolerate the shitty salesmanship one always gets at BestBuy.  Next stop- the Verizon Store.  I walked in, got served, handed over my 411 and credit card – 15 minutes later I left with two new Droids.

Within 15 minutes of returning home I was feeling buyer’s remorse for I had encountered my first Droid bug (couldn’t attach the Droids to my wireless network).  Since that day I’ve encountered one bug or stupid feature after another – but man I soooo want this thing to work.  BTW, I get great coverage with Verizon, in fact 3g everywhere I go.  I’m determined to make the Droid work for me; I have confidence in Google as well as their relationship with Verizon.  I’ve decided to be patient, learn as much about this phone as possible and share what I learn on this site.

In dealing with a number of Droid issues over the last week, I’ve searched numerous sites and read a ton of information.  Keep in mind, I’m not a programmer, but I’m fairly technical and getting my arms around some of the Droid / Android stuff requires a steeper learning curve than the iPhone did.  One thing that has bugged me about other forums and blogs is that people take too many shortcuts when explaining technical resolutions.  I can’t blame them, we’re all busy.  I’ve always hoped to find someone who would take the time to explain the nitty-gritty – while you can find some posts that articulate resolutions, they are hard to come by.  So, to make a long story short – this blog will be dedicated to describing the bugs I’ve ran across in a detailed manner in hopes that it helps others out there who do not have a software engineering degree and desire step by step directions (with pictures).

I sincerely hope this site will help someone.  You’ll have to put up with my immature rants from time to time, but bear with me – remember, I’m highly irritable.  I must also confess that there is an ulterior motive to hosting this site.  I want to get in touch with blogging technology as I’ve kind of missed the boat so far.  Wish me luck!