Kurt Shintaku's Blog

A customer asked for some of the limitations of iPhone Activesync, and I found this list that someone wrote up that I thought might be useful to others. 

Calendar

• New invites show up as tentative (grey box with dashed line boundary) in the calendar. Sometimes you can see the details but you cannot accept or decline the invite. Other times it lets you take the action. In both cases it is shown as tentative so it should allow action to be taken.
• When declining/accepting/deleting meetings – no option to specify whether to –  send email/ send edited email/not send email/ etc.
• Going to a another date other than today is a major pain as you have to scroll.
• When alerts for upcoming meetings pop up you cannot do anything with it – like ask to be reminded again etc.
• You effectively cannot create meetings on the phone. This is because you cannot add attendees to meetings or forward a meeting to anyone. So you can only meet with yourself.
• Cannot Reply/ReplyAll to meeting attendees
• Cannot dial a number from a meeting entry. WM will detect phone numbers and hypertext them so that dialing is a one (well, actually two) step process. This major if you do a lot of conference calls.
• Some folks reported that changing meeting properties on the server never finds a way into the iphone copy specially for recurring meetings. e.g. if you change the reminder from 15 mins to not remind, this never reflects in the iphone and it keeps reminding you anyway.

Email

• Meeting invites look just like any other email. This coupled with the fact that after accepting/declinign the meeting invite still hangs around, it maks it very difficult to work with meeting invites. They should have used the first column and put a different icon for Meeting invites.
• In the Email App when declining/accepting meeting requests – no feedback given. Additionally invite email sticks around to cause confusion – you don’t know whether the system took any action or not. If you come back later, you don’t know whether you have already accepted or still need to take action. The workaround is you have to deal with invites via a separate button in the Calendar App.
• Figuring out which emails are unread is hard. You have to look for that little blue dot. With iphone having such efficient UI design paradigms otherwise I am perplexed why they wasted a whole column for that? Why not do what WM did and outlook does – show the unread ones in bold. Use the saved space for more email to view.
• Can’t empty out a folder. Try cleaning you deleted (Trash) folder that has 200 deleted emails.
• Mailboxes other than Inbox are not synced by Push. You have to actually open them to force the one time sync to find out whether you have mail there.
• You cannot select which mailboxes to show in the email app. All of them show up (Happy scrolling if you have a ton like me). You should be able to choose which mailboxes to sync and only those should show up. Then those mailboxes should sync on the same schedule like Inbox.
• No way to sort emails.
• No way to search in email folder/s for a specific one. Should allow me to just type chars and it should auto filter on subject.
• No way to search on the server for a specific email.

General

• Can’t change exchange options like – can’t set OOF on/off
• ActiveSync Push does not allow to configure peak times. This is critical as push is a battery hog. If we were able to configure Peak and Off Peak hours I would switch to “Manual” in the off peak hours and leave Push on for the 8 or so Peak hours when I really need it.