Hotmail Exchange ActiveSync

Published on 12 September 2010

For a while now, I have been trying to find a way to become more organized. I tend to use Outlook on my work computer as the central hub of all my information, from tasks, to mail, to contacts, to my calendar. With that in place, I then synchronized all of this information to my phone using an ActiveSync connection to my works Exchange Server.

However, a new IT policy is going to put an end to this ActiveSync Exchange connection on my phone. As a result, I had to start looking elsewhere to allow complete synchronization of all my information. I started out trying to use Hotmail’s Outlook Connector, which would allow me to see everything in my Hotmail account within Outlook. The only problem that I have found with this, is that you can’t synchronize tasks between the two. From what I can understand, this is a requested feature for the Outlook Connector, so we will have to wait and see what happens there.

The next step was to try and get all of this information on my phone. This is possible using a direct ActiveSync connection between my phone and the computer, however, an “Over The Air” connection would definitely be better. Now, you can use Windows Mobile Live to use Messenger and Mail on your phone, however, you can’t get contacts and calendar and tasks. I dug around for a long time, but I couldn’t find a suitable solution. There I stumbled across this:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-adds-hotmail-activesync-support-for-ipad-iphone-but-not-yet-android/7251

A direct Exchange ActiveSync connection for Windows Mobile, perfect. When I first tried this, I wasn’t able to get connected. Turns out that during the time I was testing, Microsoft were still in the process of rolling out the service, but, I am happy to say that this is now up and running correctly, and working very well.

Full details of how to set up this account can be found here:

http://windowslivehelp.com/solution.aspx?solutionid=46bd910c-ed99-497d-80d7-ab8b11237ed0

This currently doesn’t work with the Android OS (I have been trying to set this up on another phone) but from what I understand, this should be coming soon.

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