Outlook Mobile Team Blog : Windows Mobile 6.0

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.

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).

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.

Warning: the following contains explicit SSL

jeffmin — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 06:34:00 GMT

(or, Messaging: Port Probing Demystified)

The "Require SSL" checkbox in the account configuration wizard for POP3/IMAP accounts is an often misunderstood feature. It's somewhat ironic, then, that the intent of the checkbox is actually to simplify account configuration.

Compare the following two screenshots taken from WM6 Standard and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Notice how much more complexity there is in the Thunderbird dialog. Now this is not intended to be a dig at Thunderbird. In fact, as a power user I prefer and appreciate this level of control. But I realize that my preference doesn't reflect the best user experience for someone who doesn't write email software for a living!

Pop quiz, hotshots:

List the standard and secure ports for POP3, IMAP, and SMTP.
What is the difference between TLS and SSL? How do you know which your server supports?
What is the difference between "Use secure connection" and "Use secure authentication"?

To expect that the average user would be able to answer any of these questions is ridiculous. If they are able to provide the server address and username, that is already a huge win in my book.

So in the name of usability, we distilled all this down to a single, easy-to-ignore checkbox. Users who don't care about security don't need to worry. More informed/vigilant/paranoid users can enable the secure setting.

Probing the issue

Despite all the settings available in Thunderbird, there are really only three common connection profiles:

Implicit SSL on the secure port (a.k.a. IMAPS/POP3S/SMTPS)
Explicit SSL on the standard port (a.k.a. STARTTLS/STLS)
Unencrypted on the standard port

Rather than ask the user to know or guess which profile matches their particular server configuration, we simply try them all until we find one that works. We call this port probing.

Let's run through an example port probing scenario where SSL is not supported:

User configures an IMAP4 account and initiates a Send/Receive
Probe attempt 1
1. Implicit SSL on IMAPS port 993
2. Connection time out
Probe attempt 2
1. Explicit SSL on IMAP port 143
2. Connection successful
3. Ask server if STARTTLS is supported
4. Server says "no"
Probe attempt 3
1. Unencrypted on IMAP port 143
2. Connection successful (just use the connection from the previous attempt)
3. Ask server if plaintext authentication is supported
4. Server says "yes"
5. Login!

Now that we know which connection method the server supports, we can continue to use that method during subsequent Send/Receive sessions.

One important aspect of this routine is that the more secure connection profiles are tried first. In the above example, plaintext login was tried only as a last resort.

Questions arise

Q. Isn't port probing slow?

A. Yes, it can be slow since in many cases we are sitting around waiting for the socket connect attempt to time out. But typically the probing is only done during the first Send/Receive so it is a one time cost.

Q. What if my server doesn't listen on the standard ports?

A. Specify the port number in the hostname (e.g. "imap.aol.com:143"). This works for both incoming and outgoing mail server.

Protip: Specifying the port number in this manner will influence the port probing logic to favor the specified port number and will generally speed up the connection process!

Q. I'm using WM5 and [scenario] won't work!

A. Unfortunately there were a number of bugs in the port probing implementation in WM5 (see Errata below)

Q. Wait, you never explained what the "Require SSL" checkbox does

A. If the checkbox is checked, the port probing will never try plaintext login over an unencrypted channel.

Errata

The port probing implementation in WM5 was not perfect, though I'd venture to guess that most users never encountered these bugs. That said, woe unto he whose email administrator did use nonstandard ports or did regard STARTTLS above all others.

If you are having email connectivity issues and you suspect port probing may be to blame, try these troubleshooting techniques:

Add or remove the port number from the hostname
Toggle the "Require SSL" checkbox on or off
Toggle the "Outgoing connection requires authentication" checkbox on or off
(Try different permutations of the above settings)

If you have control over your own mail server, some connectivity issues can be resolved by opening alternative encryption/authentication methods. For example if your server only uses explicit SSL, try enabling implicit SSL on a different port.

Smartdial: Combining Calls and Contacts

ChaniJ — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:15:00 GMT

In a recent post I talked about the introduction of Smartdial to WM Professional and described a bit of what it does. In a nutshell, it provides you with a filterable list of calls and contacts.

But I thought I should say a little bit more about the “calls and contacts” part of that description. Smartdial aggregates your contact list, your SIM contacts, your call history items, and your speed dial entries into a single searchable list. Needless to say this could be a pretty large list. I don’t consider myself much of a talker, but even my call history list gets pretty long so when you add contacts to the list you might worry that it could get unmanageable.

To try to prevent that from happening we did a couple things in WM6 to make the list more people centric and manageable.

First, we collapse all the call history entries from a particular contact or phone number. So if you have called your friend Bob three times and he has called you twice you’ll still only see a single entry for him in the list. The icon will indicate the direction of the last call (incoming, outgoing, or missed) and the communication method will be set to the last used (work, mobile, etc.) so that you can easily call back at the same number.

This doesn’t just apply to people in your contact list – if a phone number is not recognized as being associated with a particular contact then all of the calls to or from that phone number are collapsed as if it were an unnamed contact. And of course in either case you can easily get to the full list of calls to the person through the summary card and the Call History Per Contact feature that I described in another post.

Then, because this is a dialer after all, we order the list by time of last call. So the first entry in Smartdial will always be the contact or phone number that you most recently communicated with. Because we collapsed all the call history entries for a given person they will be ordered based on the time of the most recent call you had with them. So of course you can always press talk-talk to call back the last person you talked to, and it is easy to find people you contact often at the top of the list.

Of course, with the list ordered by call history it becomes even nicer to be able to use filtering to find people you haven’t spoken to as recently who are further down in the list. So it all ties back in to that original post about filtering in Smartdial – how convenient J

Windows Mobile Professional: Smartdial

ChaniJ — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:58:00 GMT

Here's another new thing in WM6 that I am particularly fond of - smart dial for WM Professional (Pocket PC). Sure, this is old hat to WM Standard (Smartphone) users, but I like the touch experience and am thrilled to have access to this feature now on my WM Professional. For those of you who aren't already familiar with I'll talk a bit about it.

You see smart dial when you enter the dialer - by pressing talk, by choosing phone from the start menu, and with this feature also by typing from the home screen. The idea is that when you are in the dialer you can see a list of calls and contacts and you can filter that list by typing or pressing keys on the on screen keypad. Use the keypad to type out the name of a friend and their contact will show up at the top of the list as all the other calls and contacts are filtered out. You can keep typing until they are at the very top of the list or type until you see them and scroll down. Personally I'm not a big fan of scrolling so I use this to quickly find and talk to people in my contact list.

This is actually the same sort of functionality you get when you type in the contacts application, although it has call history and speed dial integrated in as well. And, if filter down to find that you didn't actually have a contact for a person after all you can direct dial their number immediately.

Call History Per Contact

ChaniJ — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 04:24:00 GMT

In WM6 we did a bit of work to make it easier to track your call history with a particular person. So, in addition to being able to see your entire call history you can now get individual call history from your contact card. This is a feature I'm particularly fond of, so I thought I'd point it out and run through the details.

You find this feature in the contacts card of someone you've called or who's called you. Just under the header you'll see a new field that says "Last Call". This field gives you information about your last phone communication with this contact:

The time of the last call, or the date if it wasn't today
The number that was used - in case your contact has multiple numbers like mobile, work, home, etc...
The direction of the call in an icon - outgoing, incoming, or missed

If you action on this new field you'll be taken to a list of all your phone communication with the contact. More recent communications are at the top and each one indicates all the information shown for the "Last Call" plus the duration of each communication. From this list you can delete individual call logs, delete all call logs, or of course call someone back if you are feeling more generous :)

If you are trying to find out how many times your mom called you last week this would be the way to go, and you can even get to it from the call history list by actioning on a particular call to bring up the contact card. Of course you can still see your full call history from the dedicated app with calls to all contacts sorted by time. There you can filter for missed, incoming and outgoing calls as well.

WM 6.0 is on wikipedia + some new Messaging friendly devices...

zhamid — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 21:54:00 GMT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile. I've always been a huge fan of Wikipedia.

But really got me excited is the new Moto Q q9. It looks awesome! Check out the QWERTY keyboard. I've been going around without my laptop for a while. I think it's time to put the laptop on ebay now (uh actually it's Microsoft property so ... probably not ebay).

I can't decide between this, Samsung Blackjack and T-Mobile Dash. Only if my wife would let me get all three....

Windows Mobile 6 is here...!!!

zhamid — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 03:48:00 GMT

Drool...

After sooo many months of development, it's finally here. Public! We can write about it. We can show it off. Yes!!!!!

Over the next few days developers, testers and program managers in the Outlook Mobile team will write about features they worked on here. But lets do some high-level overview here.

So what's so cool about Windows Mobile 6? Well, it's not a comprehensive list but some of the things I like about WM6 are:

New look and feel, new icons, new sound ... little things amuse me :).
It's faster!
More secure. More cryptography. You can read and compose rights-managed mails (IRM). You can also open rights managed Office documents. It's awesome.
Ready for this? You can read HTML Mail! Yup, rich emails with images, tables, formats and much more!
Comes with Windows Live (was that too much to ask). Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Spaces...it's all in here! You can chat with multiple people at the same time.
Keyboard Shortcuts in Messaging: It seems lame, but it's super useful. Press-and-hold a shortcut key and boom, the action happens.
You can also set Out of Office messages on your exchange server using the phone. I actually use it every time I am away (yes yes, I have a bad memory and forget to set my OOF message on the desktop before I leave).
Exchange e-mail search! You can search your emails stored on the server from your device.
Quickly fetch e-mail messages from the server, instead of having to do a full sync (like in Windows Mobile 5). Emails now show this useful statusbar showing what's happening. The status bar actually goes away when there's no update to show to maximize real estate.
You can finally flag e-mail messages and sync that with the server. Makes e-mail management really easy. No more marking the email as unread to remember to action on it on the desktop later. Just flag it!
The infamous IMAP namespace issue is ... drumroll ... fixed! That's right. Fixed!!!! We had so many questions about it that I had to post an apology. But it's fixed.
What else did we fix? Oh ya, multiple accounts in Messaging sync just fine. Schedule sync works! And the reply-all bug y'all complained so much about (well, at least some of you did) is also taken care of. See, we do listen!
Call history is now linked to contacts, so it gives you context. Open a contact and see when else you communicated with that contact. Missed a call? Now instead of just seeing the number you missed, open the contact and communicate however you want (other phone numbers, SMS, IM...).
The calendar app has this fancy ribbon thing that summarizes the day. It's more useful than it seems. I'll let Calendar folks talk about their stuff in a later post.
Works magically with Windows Vista.
.NET CF 2.0 and Mobile SQL Server!
Support for storage card encryption and storage card wipe.

...and a ton more. This is the list off the top of my head of stuff that *I* enjoy.

So where are some screenshots, you ask? Fair question. In my excitement I don't want to hold this post for screenshots. They'll follow.