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by wampus 4146 days ago
I was in a similar boat, and switching to WP8 solved most of my calendar issues (and a lot of UI issues, as well). It also has very good support for multiple email accounts of different types. Not surprisingly, it has excellent Exchange support, but that's no guarantee it will be painless, due to the many bizarre configuration options offered to Exchange administrators:

1. There's no guarantee that autoconfiguration will work, especially if your address is user@example.edu but your server is exchange.example.edu.

2. You may be required to lock your screen with a password.

3. You may be required to allow remote wiping of your device (by your email provider, seriously?).

4. You may be required to enable ActiveSync in an out-of-band operation.

To make matters worse, error messages from any of the above tend to be completely meaningless.

But once you get past those hurdles, it's actually a pretty nice experience.

If you need to access calendars from other systems, you might be able to import or subscribe to them in your Microsoft account (live/outlook/onedrive/yahoo.com) online. I was able to integrate the school calendars of my children this way. It's not intuitive, but it's a set-and-forget task.

2 comments

Exchange compatibility is a bit hit and miss right now though: the full suite of Activesync policies is not available, meaning that a lot of nifty functionality that I tended to rely on back in the day (SMS sync to email inbox is one...) don't work anymore. I'm hoping WP10 brings that stuff back.

As a sidenote, this is the first time I have ever seen the solution to anything be "switch to WP8". Neat!

If there's anything that still is a horrible UI on WP8 it's the email app. It's wretched folder interactions are useless. More than any other "base app", the email app needs updating. Of course the new email app MS pushed to Android/iOS is gorgeous, but not for us WP8 folks. We're not good enough.
I think that really depends on how you use email, and since original WP was all about simplicity, the app is tailored more for a simple use (I just read email, don't delete/sort or anything else)
Yeah, deleting is really a power user feature
There is deleting and sorting (moving to another folders) and is any more time-wasting than other apps I've used. I have no idea what is he talking about.