Outlook Mobile Team Blog

Texting a Non-Mobile Number

ChaniJ — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:31:00 GMT

Commenter Jakub Anderwald notes how hard it is to send a text message to a home or work phone. I totally agree. These days many people have more than one mobile number and yet we only have space for one mobile number on our phone. As a result people have to store alternate mobile numbers as “work” or “other” and it is harder to send text messages to these numbers.

Jakub mentioned needing to copy and paste the alternate phone number to send a text message. Though not perfect, there are easier ways!

Method 1

Bring up the summary card for the contact you want to text and scroll down to the phone number you want the text to go to. Then you can start a text to that number using Menu -> Send Text Message. In the example below this will send a text message to the work number for Raymond Same.

Method 2

Open a new text message and then choose Menu -> Add Recipient to bring up a list of contacts. Choose the contact that you want to text and it will then allow you to choose which phone number you want to use. The example below also shows how you can send the text to the work number for Raymond Same.

Hopefully these methods will make it a little easier to send text messages to non-mobile numbers and work around the single mobile number limitation.

Quick Note: Email Server Search

ChaniJ — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:15:00 GMT

The other day I was on the way to a potluck with some new friends and I was running late (somehow I always underestimate how long cooking really takes). On my way over I remembered that the location had changed earlier that week and I didn’t actually know where I was going. Checking my email I found that I had deleted the part of the thread with the critical information and only had the emails about what everyone was bringing.

Admittedly that wasn’t very bright of me, but thankfully I had email server search on my phone. From my inbox I used Menu -> Tools -> Search Server and then searched for “potluck” in all folders. It found the email for me and I was able to get to the right place without having to call anyone and admit my mistake. Check it out – it’s a helpful feature, especially when you don’t know where you are going :)

How to Remove Company Directory Search History List

Outlook Mobile Bloggers — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 02:58:00 GMT

You may have wondered “How do I remove my company directory search history entries?” Well , here’s a nifty trick you can do:

From the file explorer, navigate to Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\
Delete “GalSeachHistory.dat”

This will clear your search entries from the company directory.

Note: Clearing search history in this way isn't a supported scenario, but it should work in Windows Mobile 6.

How to Access the Company Directory

Outlook Mobile Bloggers — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:52:51 GMT

Did you know that you can search your company directory on your phone? All you need is a Windows Mobile phone and an Exchange account.

How do I get to the company directory?

Open Contacts->Menu->Company Directory

What can I do in the Company Directory?

You can enter a name, email address, or office location and search the company directory. Notice also that your successful searches are saved in the search history below.

A list of resulting contacts will appear. You can view a contact’s detailed information via View. You can also take specific action on this contact. In this case for Kim Abercrombie, we can Call Work, Send e-mail, Save to Contacts, Save to SIM, or Send Text Message. Also, if you need to speak with Kim Abercrombie in person, the Office Location field can help you find her.

You can refine your search via Menu->New Search in the event that

a. You find no contacts

b. You receive a notification that you matched more than 100 contacts, and only 100 contacts are displayed.

c. You simply want to narrow your search results down.

You can also save this contact to your contacts list via Menu->Save to Contacts.

Stay tuned for a future post detailing other ways to take advantage of the company directory!

Finding Contacts FAST for Communication

ChaniJ — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:34:00 GMT

Recently I’ve posted a few tips about working with contacts and it has been mostly focused on access from the contacts application or Smartdial. I thought I should touch briefly on integration of contacts into other areas like messaging and calendar that make it really quick and easy to communicate with your contacts.

Personally my favorite way to address new emails or SMS is to use the contacts auto-suggest list from the compose form. In the “To:” field just type name, number, or email of the person you want to communicate with. As you type we’ll search for contacts that match that information and display them in a list. This picture shows auto-suggest for a new SMS indicating the phone number associated with the contacts. In this scenario I also could have searched by typing in the number.

The number of items in the list is limited to keep it from being information overload, so if the suggestions aren’t what you are looking for at first keep typing. When you see the one you want scroll down to it and then action on it to insert it. These images show the process for a new email of typing the first few characters of a contacts name, selecting him from the list of suggestions and the name and email populated in the “To:” field. This also would have worked if you were typing in his email address.

Another means of getting existing contact info is to use the “Select a Contact” dialog. To do this from the “To:” field of the compose form you can either hit Action/Enter or choose Menu - > Add Recipient. This will bring up a filterable list of your contacts (the filtering works just like in the contacts application). These images show accessing the filtering contact chooser dialog through the menu and then filtering down to a particular contact. This is just a different way to do the same thing and it’s your preference if you prefer to go with the auto-suggest or contact selection dialog.

This filterable list of contacts is also available from the calendar application when you are adding attendees to a meeting. From the appointment edit card action on the “Attendees:” field and then choose to add either required or optional attendees. Either way you will be taken to the filterable list of contacts to find your desired attendees. The following images show the process of picking attendees for an appointment and the same contact selection dialog.

Note that both auto-suggest and the contact chooser dialog will only show contacts that have applicable communication methods – for instance if you are composing an email the list of contacts will already be filtered to show only those that have an email address. This is helpful to keep the list manageable and prevent situations where you are trying to send an email with no email address. But it’s a good thing to keep in mind if you are searching for the contact and not finding them that they might not have the applicable information populated.

A caveat here is that only the mobile number counts for auto-suggest in the new SMS form (not work or other phone numbers). If you are trying to send an SMS to a number that isn’t stored in the mobile field you can still access that functionality through the contact summary card, but it definitely is not as convenient. Even so, in conjunction with the contact saving scenario that I covered a few weeks ago this covers many of the cases where you want to work with a contact outside of the contact application quickly and easily.

You’ll actually find the contact selection dialog from many different apps on the device. For instance when you are viewing pictures you are able to add one as the image for a contact and it will give you this dialog to select the appropriate contact. The contact selection experience is available across the device and enables quick filtering to find the person you are looking for.

As always, you can learn more about your Windows Mobile phone at The Windows Mobile Help & How-To page (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/help/default.mspx).

ActiveSync Tweaks to improve Battery Life

Outlook Mobile Bloggers — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:09:54 GMT

If you’re a Windows Mobile user who synchronizes with a corporate or hosted Exchange server using Activesync, you can squeeze out more battery life out of your device by tweaking a few settings. Below I’ll describe some of the settings you can change, and how to change them. These instructions apply to Windows Mobile 6.0 and greater when synchronizing against Exchange 2003 SP2 or greater. To find out what version of Windows Mobile you have: If you have a touch screen, go to: Start -> Settings -> the ‘Systems’ tab -> About. If you don’t have a touch screen, go to: Start -> Settings -> About.

By default, Windows Mobile Activesync setup configures an Exchange account to retrieve emails, contacts, calendar and tasks as and when they arrive, i.e. push email ('As items arrive' in sync settings). If you're using push email and you have a high volume of incoming mail, and you sync multiple folders, you might receive an item almost every minute. As a result your device must wake the radio stack to do expensive network operations each minute which can drain the device’s battery relatively quickly.

However, if you can tolerate a small amount of delay in receiving your email and contact/task/calendar updates, then you may want to change your schedule to sync every 5, 10, or 15 minutes; even up to 4 hours. By picking the longest time you're comfortable with, you prevent the device from having to wake up as often; and as a result, your battery life will benefit.

ActiveSync supports two syncing schedules, one for your peak hours and one for off-peak hours. Peak hours can be configured and by default it is 8:00 am to 6:00pm, Monday to Friday.

If during the off-peak hours, you do not receive as many emails, then it makes sense to put your device’s Activesync schedule to “As items arrive”. Because the radio stack is woken up only when the emails arrive and you don’t unnecessarily perform a sync every ‘x’ minutes to poll for emails, calendar events etc.

If you are a user who only receives a small amount of email during the day, it's actually better to leave your schedule set to "As items arrive" for peak hours as well. This way you get your mail quickly, and your radio only has to wake up as often as you receive mail, and not every 'x' minutes to check for new mail.

To change the schedule settings, do the following on the UI:

Go to ActiveSync (Start -> Programs -> Activesync).

Click Menu and click Schedule. (The following are the screenshots of doing the actions)

Saving Information to a Contact

ChaniJ — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:29:00 GMT

Creating a new contact from scratch is straight-forward enough both on the desktop and on your phone through the contacts application. But sometimes you have information you want to store before you have the contact itself. You may not have cut-paste access to this data or even if you did you want an easier way to get the data into a contact.

In this case you may often see a “Save” option that will allow you to do this in a stream lined way. There are many locations providing this options but let’s take the dialer as an example. Say you get a call from Bob Kelly, a new friend that you met recently. When the call is over you want to save the number so you can call him again. In the dialer you will see their number in the list and the “Save” option.

When you choose save you will see a list of all your contacts, in case this was an additional number for someone you already know, but at the top you will also see “<New Contact>”. Since you don’t have a contact for Bob yet you select that option.

At this point you see a simple interface to get the basic information in about the contact: first name, last name, and communication type. The phone number is already filled in for you, but you still get to specify the type of phone – mobile, work, home, etc.

When you are done entering your information you hit Save and the summary card will be brought up to display the information you just entered. This is the same card you would see if you opened the contact from the contacts application. If there was additional information you’d like to provide about Bob, perhaps the company he works for, you can open up the full contacts edit card by choosing “Menu->Edit”.

A recent call in the dialer is just one scenario for saving data in this way. Others include:

From an email – Action on the sender while viewing an email to bring up a temporary contact card that displays the user name and email address. From here you can choose Save to get that information into a contact.
From a text message sender – Action on the phone number when viewing a text message that has not been matched with a contact and you will get an option to create a new contact and start this process.
From the body or subject of a text message or email – If someone sent you a text message or email with a phone number in it you can action and then choose Menu -> Save to Contacts to start this process for that number.
From the dialer – If someone gives you their number and you type it into the dialer but don’t want to call them right then you can choose Save instead to keep the information for later.

If you’d like to learn more about your Windows Mobile phone check out The Windows Mobile Help & How-To page at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/help/default.mspx.

Patch Tuesday: WM 6.1 SMTP fix released!

Outlook Mobile Bloggers — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 05:59:00 GMT

12/1/2008 Update:

We've narrowed the patch incompatibility to a certificate mismatch. This means that while the patch is functionally sound, the device won't allow the code contained in the patch to run. We'll be working with the device manufacturer to get a version of the patch that will work for you.

If you're successfully running the patch now you don't need any further updates for the SMTP bug.

11/17/2008 Update:

We're still looking into the patch problem- and so far we're only seeing it on the Blackjack II. If you encounter the problem on a different device we'd love to hear about it in our comments section.

Remember that the original bug and the problem that we're having with the patch only affects POP and IMAP accounts.

11/12/2008 Update:

We are seeing the issue reported in one of our comments on some devices:

After applying the patch you may not be able to access your POP or IMAP accounts.

Note that this is not occuring on all devices, so you may not experience a problem with the patch. We are trying to determine how many devices out there might run into this now.

If you apply the patch and have this problem you can uninstall the patch.

On Windows Mobile Standard: Start, Settings, Remove Programs

On Windows Mobile Professional: Start, Settings, Remove Programs

Check back here and we'll keep you posted on our progress.

As some of you have noticed, a bug recently appeared on Windows Mobile 6.1 devices that prevented certain users from being able to send e-mail. It took more time than we expected to investigate the cause, create a fix, and finally test it across the various flavors of Windows Mobile 6.1 out there, but we're happy to say that as of yesterday the fix is available: download it now!

We noticed some confusion around the feature that caused the bug, so here’s a quick description of it: This feature allows operators to specify an alternate server that can be used only when your device has a problem accessing your mail account’s SMTP directly. When can this happen? Some mail services, like those provided by ISPs, only allow access to their SMTP servers when you are directly on their network. With this feature, it’s supposed to be easier for end users to send mail on a Windows Mobile device.

When the feature was shipped, a bug was introduced with it. If your operator doesn’t make use of the alternate SMTP server feature and you encounter an error reaching the SMTP server you specified when setting up the account, your account settings become corrupted. Ironically, the end result is you can’t send mail on that account after this happens- it’s not the operator’s fault, it’s ours.

In this case we were able to get a fix out and provide it directly to you instead of routing it through our partners. This isn’t something we’ve found we have to do very often, but we’re working on improving the way we deal with these kinds of issues in the future. Hopefully this won’t happen again, but if it does we’ll be faster in getting the fix out to you.

Many thanks go out from the team to our customers and especially to Tracy and Matt who went the extra mile to help us identify the problem!

Thanks for your patience on this one.

A couple of things to remember about the patch:

- It only applies to Windows Mobile 6.1.1 through 6.1.3. Windows Mobile 6.1.4 and later are already fixed.

- If you ever clear the flash memory on your device you’ll have to reinstall the patch again.

Links:

KB Article 958639

Download the patch

-Bill Saez

Using Hotmail with Windows Mobile

angrue — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:29:00 GMT

Today we’re going to talk about using your Hotmail or Windows Live account with Outlook Mobile.

What does sync’ing with Windows Live support?

Email (Your choice of push email or scheduled sync)
Contact sync
Uploading photos to your Live Spaces
Live Messenger (in some cases)

How do I set it up?

If you have Windows Mobile 6 and the Windows Live software is pre-installed by your phone manufacture:

Simply open the programs menu and select Windows Live. Follow the setup wizard and viola, you’ll have your Hotmail / Live mail and contacts syncing to your device in no time at all.

Alternatively, you can enter your live.com or hotmail.com email address in our email setup wizard and we’ll automatically launch Windows Live setup for you. However, some of you may have email addresses that are hosted by MSN or Windows Live, such as sympatico.ca, but don’t have a live.com or hotmail.com domain. For such email addresses, this method will not work, so try 1 first.

How to get Windows Live if it isn’t pre-installed on your phone:

Visit the following web site on your mobile phone to download Windows Live for Windows Mobile, or visit the site on your PC, download the appropriate file, copy it to your phone, and open it on your phone in File Explorer:

http://wl.windowsmobile.com

This download supports Windows Mobile 6 device for push Hotmail, contact sync, and uploading pictures to spaces! Live Messenger is not included in this download and if you are interested in Messenger access you’ll have to contact your mobile operator.

Once you’ve install Windows Live for Windows Mobile from the above site, you can then follow items 1 or 2 from above to setup your mail and contacts.

Limitations:

Microsoft will continue to invest in Windows Live for Windows Mobile, but for the time being there are some limitations:

You can only setup one Live or Hotmail account. If you have additional accounts that you need to check the best solution is going to http://mobile.live.com in Internet Explorer mobile.

Synchronization with your Windows Live calendar is not supported.

Invitations and Meeting Requests sent you your hotmail or live account can’t be accepted on your phone. You can still accept meeting requests sent to other accounts on your phone, and you can accept invitations and meeting requests for your Live account at www.hotmail.com on your desktop.

We hope you enjoy the Windows Live experience on your phone. We in the Outlook Mobile team don’t make the Windows Live application itself, but since it integrates into Outlook Mobile, we work closely with the team and we’ll be sure to pass on any comments and suggestions you may have!

-- Tony Grue

Updated on 7/22/08 with new link

Have a question about Outlook Mobile? Leave a comment or check out the Windows Mobile Forums

Using Gmail with Outlook Mobile

jeffmin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:43:34 GMT

In this post I discuss some of the most common issues that arise when trying to use Gmail on your Windows Mobile phone.

IMAP vs. POP

There are two 'languages' (or protocols) that the phone can use to communicate with the Gmail servers. These protocols are called POP3 and IMAP4 and can be selected in the email setup wizard.

Generally speaking, if you are using Windows Mobile to access your Gmail account, you should use IMAP. The Gmail POP server has some well-known 'quirks' that often end up confusing users. Some of the more common POP-related issues are listed below.

Q. Messages that I mark as Read/Unread on the phone do not get updated on the Gmail website.

A. This is an inherent limitation of the POP protocol. IMAP does not have this limitation.

Q. Messages are being downloaded to my inbox but disappear the next time I synchronize.

A. This is because the Gmail POP server only reports back information about 'new' messages. The phone interprets the lack of information about old messages to mean that they were deleted from the server.

One workaround is to edit your username in the account settings wizard to use a format specific to Gmail POP accounts. Instead of the username myaddress@gmail.com, enter the username "recent:myaddress@gmail.com".

The addition of the "recent:" prefix informs the Gmail server that the phone wants information about all the messages from the past 30 days. Unfortunately this means that you won't be able to read messages older than 30 days.

Q. Messages older than 30 days are being deleted from the phone even though I configured my account to download all messages.

A. See above.

Q. Messages that I send to others are showing up in my own inbox.

A. This is a quirk of the Gmail POP server. Some people prefer this behavior since it allows them to review messages they have sent.

IMAP vs. Windows Mobile 6.0

In WM 6.0, we implemented some features that made setting up an email account easier than ever. These included a revamped setup wizard and automatic setup for well-known email services.

However WM 6.0 shipped before Gmail unveiled IMAP access, so automatic setup creates a POP account.

To disable automatic setup, uncheck the box labeled "Try to get e-mail settings automatically from the Internet" on page one of the account creation wizard.

Some versions of Windows Mobile might not have this checkbox. In that case, you must perform a bit of trickery to fool the setup wizard. When asked for your email address, type a fake address that does not end in @gmail.com. After the account is created, edit the account settings, and enter the correct email address.

Have other Gmail questions or tips? Post a comment!