Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Exchange android app

I got a Tmobile G1 last weekend, and the only thing that I thought it was missing was an app to get my work email through exchange.  Sure, you can use the web browser to do it, but it kind of sucks.

So, I started looking into OWA and what is available from an API/protocol level and it supports WebDAV.  After a long weekend of playing with it, I had a working (although quite simple) little android app to pull down email from my exchange inbox.

There are lots of things is doesn't support yet, that would be nice:

* folders other than the inbox
* dealing with a large number of messages in a folder
* background syncing
* calendar/contacts, etc
* sending mail
....

But, it's a good start and will likely get me by until someone writes a real exchange app.  I might work on folder support, but I tend to use a single folder just to archive email on exchange, and I'm not sure how well my code is going to work if I try to pull up a several thousand email folder.  That might be a lot of work for something that I'm not likely to use much.

I did open source the code, and give it a home over on google code hosting, if anyone would like to join in and make it better, that'd be great!  I just paid my registration on the android Market, and I'll probably publish it tonight after I make sure it's all packaged up and signed.

4 comments:

Tom H said...

this is great, thanks so much for releasing the first android exchange email app :). still trying to get it to work with my server, i'm using forms auth with ISA server and exchange 2003.

Unknown said...

Hi Brian,

I'm using Samsung Galaxy Spica.
Good thing this OWA. But I realized one problem with this application.
Usually I'm using "internet" APN at my device. But when I want to read any e-mail I want to use another APN, for eg.: "myfirm.com"
Can you do the selection of APN when using exchange it?

Br,
Thomas

on1wheel said...

I keep getting target host must not be null, or set in parameters

Sappermajor said...

Its a pity you gave up on this as it could have been very useful and people would pay for it as our IT can't get EAS to work.
Nick