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 