[Fascinate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] vaporbox:
Question for 8notime:

We are long-time Blackberry users, (since the first BB was released in the 1990's). We run Exchange 2010 and BES in a corporate environment but have pretty much had it with RIM at this point. RIM's software and devices are so buggy that we can no longer justify the cost to maintain RIM's products, so we are investigating making the move to Android devices and OS.

We have done some reading in the Android forums and looked at several Android devices, including the Motorola Droid 2 Global because we need global coverage and physical keyboards.

Here are the questions we have relating to if the switch from the BB environment to the Android environment will meet our business requirements:

Exchange 2010:

What features of Exchange 2010 are not supported by Android or an Android app?

We need each Android device to be able to simultaneously support multiple Exchange 2010 accounts from separate Exchange 2010 servers including email, contacts and calendaring as true Exchange 2010 accounts, not as IMAP accounts on the Android device.

(1) Email:

- We need real time push email (not simulated push via "polling").

- Support for email sub-folders and synching of same.

- Is there a significant impact on the battery life of the Android when true push email is in effect, (keep in mind we are coming from BB devices that employ true push email from the email server with little to no battery impact).

- We need each Android device to be able to support multiple IMAP or POP accounts in addition to supporting the above mentioned multiple Exchange 2010 accounts.

- We need the Android device to be able to reply to emails received by each of the respective email accounts with the email reply address coming from the account that received the mail originally.

- Are emails sent from the Android encrypted like they are on the BB devices?

- What are the security concerns around using Active Sync from Andriod devices as compared to BB devices communicating with the BB BES?

(2) Calendaring:

- We need each Android device, (without using Google Calendaring or a Google account), to fully support multiple Exchange 2010 calendars simultaneously in a combined calendar view and all Calendaring functions in Exchange 2010 including accept, decline, tentative, propose new time, forwarding of appointments, ability to edit the appointment, ability to create a new appointment and invite attendees from the GAL, reminders, snooze, reoccurring appointments and etc.

(3) Contacts:

- We need each Android device to be able support Contacts and Contact sub-folders and all fields supported by Exchange 2010 / Outlook 2010. In other words are there Outlook Contact fields that Android does not support?

(4) Syncing:

- The ability to do both wireless syncing of contacts and calendar(s) in Exchange 2010 as well as wired (USB) syncing of selected additional local Outlook PST folders that contain contacts and calendar appointments (that are not stored on the Exchange 2010 server). We are looking to have the functionality that we currently have in the Blackberry Desktop Manager 6.0 that let's users select which folders to sync via USB.

- Does Android use "ActiveSync", if so what features or drawbacks are there to ActiveSync vs the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES)?

We looked for answers to the above in the Android forums, and found bits and pieces but nothing definitive. As you can see, our business requirements call for a corporate multiple Exchange 2010 mobile device and OS solution that fully replaces our BB BES. Does such an animal exist in the Android environment?