Committing to Office 365 with BT

[briesmith]

I am attracted to the idea of Office 365 and I am thinking of using the Office 365 service as hosted by BT and, hopefully, you won't mind if I trouble you with a couple of queries?

Will ALL my emails be in one place including those I send as well as receive? I ask because at the moment I use a desktop PC, a laptop PC, an iPad, an ASUS TF101 Transformer, an Android phone (HTC Desire S) and a Windows Mobile 7 smartphone (HTC HD7) and my emails get into a total mess.

Secondly, as well as my personal btconnect account I use a work email service which is IMAP and hosted on my company's servers and I use gmail and hotmail; will these four different services (the BT service plus these other 3) all be managed from a single portal or point of access using a single email client?

[Plumly]

Hi Briesmith,

1st) To have all your mail "Sync'd" rather then all over the place as you suggest, you would need to have the Business Email product (somtimes refered to as Organise and Share) this Basically sets up the mailbox as an IMAP/server Sync set up allowing one update to be Syncronised to all devices you have,

2) not too sure about this one, but if you have your Gmail hotmail and work e-mail currently set to IMAP, then O365 will allow IMAP with the Business Email Package, so you'll be able to use like Gmail Hotmail Etc,

Please note without the Business Email Package, you will only be able to use Pop3 and SMTP, which don't allow Sync between the server

Thanks
Plumly

[briesmith]

Thanks Plumly

I have taken out the Organise and Share upgrade - although why BT should charge for it I've no idea, all you get is IMAP (sort of) and that's what Google Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo and uncle Tom etc all give away for free - and more or less got it working.

Note for anybody reading this with an iPad as well as an Android, you need to specify Exchange as your email source when setting up the iPad (there is a BT Help doc somewhere but finding it again is beyond me but the server name is HE if that helps).

There is a problem with Android 3.2 on my tablet in that it won't map its local SENT folder to the Sent Items folder on the BT IMAP server. Any emails sent from the tablet are stored in the local SENT folder and don't appear in the IMAP structure which completely defeats the whole purpose of IMAP of course.

Stress this isn't a BT problem. It's Google saying, "well if you want IMAP on Android you should use Gmail and we're not going to fix our email client". This last bit about not fixing the problem is a reference to the fact that the SENT folder issue dates back nearly 4 years now to the very first version of Android and is still not fixed even in Android 4 (ICS).

Amazing and underlines how Google will never have any credibility in the Enterprise world as a solution provider.

[celavey]

Does this feature really works 24/7? How does it actually work?