Today we’ll talk about Exchange ActiveSync Mail Apps for AndroidForWork environment.

In my company we use Blackberry UEM 12.6 as MDM platfrom; with the new functionalities of Android For Work we can enable only some apps for the Play Store and block all the other ones.

As Mail apps we tested Blackberry Hub, Outlook by Microsoft, BlueMail by Blue Mail Inc, Email Exchange by MailWise and Vmware Boxer on mainly Samsung S7 devices.

Here some considerations and at the end the definitive choice.

Blackberry Hub

PROS:

• Good integration with the UEM Environment
• Good Support for Exchange/ActiveSync
• Receive settings and configurations from UEM

CONS:

• not working with hybrid configuration of Exchange and office 365
• Free only for 30 days and purchasable only by single user, not via B2B channel

Outlook

PROS:

• Very good support of Exchange and Office 365 connections; quick, clean and essential app.
• completely free and without advertising

CONS:

• no integration with the system calendar and partially with the address book (in-app option to sync contacts but a lot of problems for searching into Company Exchange Global Address List)
• No week-view into integrated Calendar
• Very slow sync for mail and calendar events (even 30 minutes late!!)

BlueMail

PROS:

• Good support of Exchange and Office365 (but only with thirdy-part provided ActiveSync component)
• Perfect sync with the company GAL
• Perfect sync with the Calendar
• Completely free and without advertising

CONS:

• Without the default Android e-mail client and without another app that wake up the ActiveSync feature BlueMail cannot manage ActiveSync accounts.

VmWare Boxer

PROS:

• Good support of Exchange and Office365
• Perfect sync with the company GAL
• Perfect sync with the Calendar
• Completely free and without advertising

CONS:

• some minor features outlook-desktop style are missing

MailWise

PROS:

• Good support of Exchange and Office365
• Perfect sync with the company GAL
• Perfect sync with the Calendar

CONS:

• the free version of the app requests upgrade to pro version for 2.99$.

Conclusion

At the end of the tests we decided to use VmWare Boxer as default mail/calendar/address book client for Android because of the limits and lacks of the other apps.

In the future we hope that Blackberry could resolve the license issues and the office 365 (also in hybrid configuration) support for its Android suite apps because this could effort security, limitations and control on the users accounts.