from the show-of-hands,-who-is-surprised? dept.
Until last week, Microsoft supported Outlook.com users on Android with a bare-bones but functional client, Outlook.com. Because the Outlook.com client exposed the calendars to the Android system, any Android calendar app or widget could read and write to them.
Last December though, Microsoft acquired a startup called Acompli, figuring it was quicker than writing its own Outlook client, and Acompli was rebranded as Outlook. Last week, Microsoft finally shut down the older Outlook.com app, leaving consumers to use the rebranded Acompli.
But Outlook has never exposed the calendars to the Android system, so the effect of the change was sandboxing Outlook.com users into the new client.
...
Business users don't get Tasks support, despite very rich Task support in Exchange. After Evernote became a hit, OneNote became the preferred Tasks "experience", winning out the internal turf war. (Tasks isn't even supported in the Outlook.com consumer service).Window Phone dumps Exchange Tasks as a huge alphabetical list. The mobile clients don't support them at all. Exchange users can find excellent third-party PIM tools on iOS and Android to access Exchange PIM services, but none from Microsoft.
Nadella is leading Microsoft into a new Golden Age.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Sunday October 04 2015, @04:27PM
They still seem to be missing out on the whole "If we don't do it well, someone else will" thing. They seem to think they still have a monopoly lock on all things. They got boned on mobile even though they were one of the first with a mobile OS. I'm really hoping they get boned on Exchange as well at some point. That monstrosity unfortunately doesn't have a lot of standards based competition. Google services are competition, but it's still proprietary.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Monday October 05 2015, @08:31AM
Indeed.
There's a reason I bought a third-party Exchange integration app for my Android phone. I just don't trust Microsoft to keep things running, or to do them properly, and certainly not to support older devices.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pav on Tuesday October 06 2015, @12:10AM
I think this is done already. SOGo [www.sogo.nu] natively supports Outlook if required (via Samba4), has its own web client/s and supports native Android, iPhone and Blackberry connectivity (including tasks). What's more they're very F/OSS friendly and natively support Thunderbirds callendar/task etc functionality, to the extent that they've helped develop/expand it. The companies involved are commercial shops so I'm sure they'd be happy to maintain a "cloud" for someone *eyeroll*.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gravis on Sunday October 04 2015, @05:00PM
don't use Microsoft products!
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday October 05 2015, @02:53PM
Management speaks MBA. This means that "Microsoft == industry standard" (I was told this by a manager). Anything else is unacceptable or amateurish.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Monday October 05 2015, @03:06PM
then you are obviously working for the wrong people.
(Score: 1) by bigmadwolf on Tuesday October 06 2015, @02:07PM
Yeah, very true unfortunately. As part of my role I admin a small network on the side, all services run on some flavor of *nix - no MS in there. Always amusing when MBA types come along and jump up and down that we're not using MS Exchange, Windows server etc. I inform such people that if we switched over to MS, apart from the licence $ we'd have to pay I fear that looking after that network would no longer be doable 'on the side'.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 06 2015, @02:45PM
The shop I work in is small, in fact IT is not even my profession. But of course, I've been a computer guy for most of my life so looking after our small network is no big deal. It's just one of my many hats. We had a manager for about two years who while smart in many ways, was very ignorant when it came to IT. It was his belief that Microsoft was the crème de la crème of software. He even wished our ERP software was MS so it would be an easy to use homogeneous environment. The only good thing he did was my convincing him that we needed a major infrastructure upgrade which he signed off and we spent 20 grand on all new PC's and networking gear. Replaced a horrid terminal server that was a major point of failure.
(Score: 2, Touché) by redneckmother on Sunday October 04 2015, @05:22PM
Perhaps a new Golden Shower?
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Gaaark on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:15PM
Same as the old golden shower!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Funny) by davester666 on Monday October 05 2015, @08:05AM
R Kelly used to run MS?
(Score: 4, Touché) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday October 04 2015, @05:26PM
Mobile First? Microsoft Decides to Kneecap Its Android Users Instead
Kneecap? Really? Just a tiny bit of hyperbole there, I think.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 5, Funny) by nitehawk214 on Sunday October 04 2015, @06:45PM
I used to have mobile email, then I took an arrow to the knee.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @10:13PM
Thank you for your productive contribution to the discussion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @11:22PM
Now if only someone would mod the OP down to -1 too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @10:27PM
This is Microsoft, they support THEIR applications/systems/infrastructure. Supporting any 3rd party system is outside their core business and causes them more overhead in the long run.
I dont expect them to support Android, anymore than i expect apple to support Microsoft, or any other vendor supporting other peoples stuff. Everyone wants lock-in on their own products, 'compatibly' can strain or break that goal.
The real thing here is to choose who you like and stick with them, and to hell with the 'others'. ( in my case its to hell with Microsoft and Apple both.. )
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @11:19PM
That is exactly the point. Who the hell is running Microsoft Exchange in 2015 anyway?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday October 05 2015, @12:07AM
Supporting any 3rd party system is outside their core business and causes them more overhead in the long run.
This is quite possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard from a Micro$oft shill! Are you serious? Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Of course they would support "other people's stuff"! They want "other people's stuff"! Interoperability is good for business, gets you more customers, and takes them away from software mongers that fail at it.
The only way such "non-support" makes sense is when it is active attempts to enforce an illegal monopoly, and then it is sabotage more than just "non-support". Let me repeat: "illegal monopoly", illegal restraint on trade, illegal. Micro$oft. "Your operating system has performed an illegal operation. Quit, turn yourself in, retry?"
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday October 05 2015, @07:55AM
Illegal monopoly? Microsoft is a bit player in the relevant markets. I'm not terribly impressed with Microsoft or Google in this area. There are open protocols for syncing this kind of data (CalDAV and CardDAV), which have a number of (open and proprietary) server implementations. The only mobile OS that supports them out of the box is iOS. DAVDroid for Android kind-of supports them (though doesn't do well with conflicts - server always wins, even if the client updated the event more recently than the server). Microsoft actually has implemented both of these protocols in Windows Phone, but locks them to a few vendors' services. Google makes it almost impossible to get a read-only feed of a calendar from anything other than Google Calendar.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 04 2015, @11:27PM
anyone uses MS products dumbfounds me. The only MS thing I use is a hotmail address as a junk mail black hole.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @12:03AM
And a half hour after posting that... My daughter wants me to fix her Win 7 laptop because it won't play a legal DVD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @08:32AM
No one ever gets fired for backing Microsoft at work.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @09:03AM
No one ever gets fired for backing Microsoft at work.
At some point the worm turns, and all the MSCE's will have to find jobs that match their skill set.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @10:59AM
Most of my customers (small-medium businesses) have never even heard of Linux. Sure they have heard of apple, but it is rare that I get asked about apple in a business environment.
Microsoft isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
The heady days at the beginning of the internet age are over. The champions have won their places and will not soon or easily be dislodged. Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2015, @03:09PM
People like being productive.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Monday October 05 2015, @12:36AM
I looked for alternatives after seeing that the default email client in Android would force me to leave my personal phone hostage to my company's Exchange admins. I actually didn't mind that so much except for the asinine device password policy that was even stricter than that they imposed for Active Directory passwords, forcing me to use an even longer password with more non-alphanumeric characters that are such a pain to type on a phone keyboard... I saw the Outlook app, and figured that Microsoft would at least get their own Exchange client right. No such luck. It had sync issues up the wazoo: it would alert me to "new email" that unaccountably disappeared when I actually tried to open their app to actually read it, it would continue to alert me to meetings that I had deleted or had been cancelled and so forth. *facepalm* It was almost useless, and actually seemed to get worse over time, with every one of the frequent updates breaking something new. And so I eventually settled with the Nine email app, which works much better overall. It still has sync issues but those are minor compared to the mess with Android Outlook, e.g. some messages I had read on the desktop would continue showing as unread on Nine, but nothing more serious than that.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.