The other day at work I was asked if you can connect Android phones to Exchange Online…so I went off to investigate.
Microsoft’s page gives a list of devices and supported OS’s:
http://www.microsoft.com/online/mobility/exchange-activesync.mspx
I’ve got the HTC Hero and so does the person who asked, so that’s the route my investigation took, I opened up the “Mail” section on my phone and went to work.
The auto-detect feature doesn’t work with Exchange Online (or so it seems) so it’s on to manual setup, which asks for:
- Email Address
- Server Name
- Domain
- Username (Same as the email address)
- Password
Apart from a couple, they’re all pretty self explanatory but there’s one that could trip you up:
Server Name:
There are 3 different server URLs depending on location:
but it just wasn’t working for me, so I called Microsoft BPOS support. After a bit of a false start, they were very helpful and gave me a call to work through the issues.
I navigated to OWA through my browser (mail.microsoftonline.com)but couldn’t log in. I then found it was resolving itself to the “red001…” address, which clearly wasn’t right as I’m in the UK, so I cleared all my bookies, cache etc and went back to the setup screen.
I tried again and still no luck, but then I tried one last thing…entering the server URL without the “https://” and the start. To be honest, I’m not sure why I tried that (although I’m equally sure that someone more techie than me would have tried that first!) but it worked! Entering simply “red002.mail.emea.microsoftonline.com” worked a charm and BOOM, I could see my emails on my Android device. A quick check revealed that the calendar and contacts were syncing too…brilliant 🙂
I hope that helps anyone wondering if this can be done and/or having trouble getting it working 🙂
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 
You are a star! I’m ordering tomorrow.. 🙂
What value did you enter for the domain?
Hi,
I’m pretty sure the domain value just needs to be your BPOS domain but I can’t actually remember! I will confirm and let you know 🙂
Cheers
Rich
Thanks very much for confirming that Rich; much appreciated!
Nice one – saved me a lot of faffing around. I owe you a beer!!
Nice piece about Microsoft Exchange Online. However, it’s a pity that Android Exchange support requires third party apps like Touchdown to fully work
You’re a hero! Thank you – The HTC people should know about this!
Fine app for android thanks for the tip I am already experimenting in my android and perfect
a work in very nice.
One other note – for K9 mail on Android, you have to select “always use TLS” under authentication, otherwise it will never connect. The docs all say SSL.
Thanks man! No idea how long that would have taken me to figure out.
Here’s a tip if you’re trying to figure out which subdomain to use (red001, red002, etc): goto http://mail.microsoftonline.com and login to webmail. You’ll be redirected to the correct subdomain, and you can copy and paste it into android.
FWIW, mine was red001.mail.microsoftonline.com.
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