In this week’s spotlight post, Mike Craven of “The Office Maven”, takes us on a detailed walkthrough of the mobile devices’ synchronization feature found in WHS Outlook.
Without further ado,…here’s Mike!
I get lots of support requests asking how to sync your Outlook data (in WHS Outlook) with your mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.). Well, I’ve found that the easiest way to do this, when using WHS Outlook, is to setup a free Windows Live Hotmail account and install the free Outlook Hotmail Connector application/add-in into the copy of Microsoft Outlook (2010 or 2007) that is installed directly on your WHS.
The Outlook Hotmail Connector works great with WHS Outlook allowing you to access your Windows Live Hotmail account’s email, contacts, and calendars directly within in Microsoft Outlook. Also, since Windows Live Hotmail supports Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), you can easily sync your Windows Live Hotmail account with your mobile devices making it so that any changes your make to your Windows Live Hotmail account’s email, contacts, and/or calendars via WHS Outlook immediately sync up with your mobile devices and vise versa.
More Information
- Hotmail now supports push email, calendar, and contacts with Exchange ActiveSync
- Hotmail Calendar
- Calendar: Sync your mobile phone and PC using ActiveSync
- Hotmail in sync with your iPhone
Windows Live Hotmail Sync
You can even use Windows Live Hotmail features without changing your existing email address:
For my own family, I’ve setup a Windows Live Hotmail account for each member and an additional “Craven Family” Windows Live Hotmail account with a single calendar that is shared across all of the other family accounts. From within WHS Outlook, I use the Outlook Hotmail Connector to add each family member’s Windows Live Hotmail account to their very own Outlook profile (plus the shared “Craven Family” account). That way, each member of the family can interact with their own Windows Live Hotmail account’s email, contacts, and calendars in addition to the email, contacts, and calendar from the shared Hotmail account.
- Outlook 2010 – Use a Windows Live Hotmail account in Outlook
- Outlook 2007 – Use a Windows Live Hotmail account in Outlook
Quick walkthrough showing you how all of this is done..
1) Go to Windows Live Hotmail, click on the “Get Hotmail” button, and sign up for a new Hotmail account (if you don’t already have one)
2) Sign in to your newly created Hotmil account and verify that everything is working properly. You can even take the time to add some of your contacts and calendar events if desired.
3) Now that your Hotmail account is all set up, download a copy of the Outlook Hotmail Connector.
4) Start a Remote Desktop Connection to your Windows Home Server as the Administrator and install the Outlook Hotmail Connector (that you just downloaded) from the Administrator’s desktop.
5) If you haven’t done so already, open the WHS Console, go to Settings, select the WHS Outlook Settings panel, click on the Configure button, and grant your user access to WHS Outlook.
6) Connect to WHS Outlook (as the user you’ve just allowed access for) by double-clicking on the “WHS Outlook.rdp” file located in the user’s shared folder.
7) If this is the first time the user has ever run WHS Outlook, simply follow the on-screen prompts to add the user’s Hotmail account to Outlook (Otherwise, skip straight to step #8).
8) If the user has already set up their WHS Outlook profile, then add the new Hotmail account as an additional mail account in Outlook (Otherwise, skip straight to step #9):
Outlook 2010 – Click on Outlook’s “File” tab and then click on the “Add Account” button.
9) Once your Hotmail account has been added to Outlook, you can verify that your Hotmail account’s email, contacts, and calendar(s) show up in WHS Outlook (note the calendar event that we created in Hotmail via its web browser user interface shows up just fine in WHS Outlook; As does the contacts and email messages).
10) Now that we have our Hotmail account functioning in WHS Outlook, it’s time to sync it up with your mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.). You can find information about syncing your Hotmail account with most popular phones (such as the iPhone, etc.) on the following web page:
Get Windows Live Hotmail to Go
Personally, I use a HP webOS smartphone (because webOS RULES! 
) and so I’ll show you how its setup on a webOS device.
That’s it! WHS Outlook is now fully in sync with your mobile device. Enjoy! 
– MIKE
More: WHS Outlook | Support
I personally prefer sync with gmail…
@DrWHS,
I would have considered Gmail as well since it also now supports Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), but unfortunately it doesn’t work well with Outlook (and hence WHS Outlook) since it doesn’t have a “connector” add-in available for Outlook (like Microsoft’s Outlook Hotmail Connector) that can sync a Gmail account’s email, contacts, and calendars with Outlook.
If you only need to sync your Gmail account’s email with Outlook and your mobile devices, then Gmail supports the use of the IMAP protocol and that will work just great. However, you’re out of luck when it comes to also syncing your Gmail account’s contacts and calendars. As far as I am aware, there isn’t a free add-in available from Google that syncs it contacts with Outlook, and the free Google Calendar Sync add-in (which is used to sync Google Calendars with Outlook) doesn’t work with WHS Outlook (since it is designed to run as a desktop application that runs at set intervals in order to perform its sync operations and not as a true Outlook COM add-in that runs from within Outlook itself).
Therefore, the only viable solution for syncing WHS Outlook with your mobile devices that I am aware of at this time is using a free Windows Live Hotmail account and Microsoft’s free Outlook Hotmail Connector add-in (just as I’ve outlined above).
Alternatively, you can set up your WHS with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and use it to sync your email, contacts, and calendars across your family member’s mail profiles in WHS Outlook, but as far as I am aware, there isn’t any way to also sync the SharePoint Lists up to your mobile devices. See the following write-up I did on using WSS with WHS Outlook:
Calendar Sharing in WHS Outlook – Part 2: SharePoint Lists
http://www.homeserverland.com/forum/index.php?/topic/1314-calendar-sharing-in-whs-outlook-part-2-sharepoint-lists/
I’m all ears if you, or anyone else for that matter, can provide an alternate solution that works well with WHS Outlook.
– MIKE
Thanks Mike for taking the time to support your add-ins. I am using google apps as a fake Exchange server and it does support Address book synchronization afaik. Calendar requires the said plug-in/app.
@DRK,
Ah… I see that Google now offers a Outlook add-in (which they wrongly call a “plug-in”) for their Google Apps platform called “Google Apps Sync” that may just do the trick. Let me go check it out and see if it will work with WHS Outlook. Thanks for the heads-up.
– MIKE
Looks like “Google Apps Sync” won’t work as it requires a Google Apps Business or Google Apps Education account (which costs $$$).
@DRK, care to explain how you’re using Google Apps (I assume the free version) to work as a “fake Exchange server”)?
– MIKE
Hi Mike, when I configured google apps to work with my iPhone I did not select the IMAP option, instead the instructions were clear to pick Microsoft Exchange server and that works perfectly. My iPhone synchronizes emails, contacts and calendar. The problem is when I try to replicate this in Outlook, picking Exchange server for google apps does not work. Any ideas?
@DRK,
Since Gmail now supports Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) just like Windows Live Hotmail does, you can indeed sync your Gmail account’s email, contacts, and calendars with your smartphone (as long as your smartphone supports EAS that is; which most modern smartphones like the iPhone do).
However, as you’ve found, the problem comes when trying to sync your Gmail account’s email, contacts, and calendars with Microsoft Outlook (and hence WHS Outlook). In order to do that, a “connector” add-in is required for Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft offers their “Outlook Hotmail Connector” add-in free of charge in order to bring all of their Windows Live Hotmail account content into Microsoft Outlook for you (and it works just great as my article above shows).
Google on the other hand only allows their connector (which is named “Google Apps Sync”) to work with a Google Apps Business account which costs $50 per year. It won’t work with a free Gmail account. Also, since I’m unable to test it (since I don’t have a Google Apps business account), I have no idea if it will actually work with WHS Outlook or not even if you do pony up the $50 per year. Personally, if I was going to pony up any cash for such a hosting service, I’d much rather pay $72 per year and go for Microsoft’s new Office 365 package instead).
So… There’s no (free) way to sync your Gmail account’s contacts and calendars with WHS Outlook that I am aware of. For the email side of things, you can enable the IMAP protocol on your Gmail account, and then add your Gmail account to Outlook as a new account using the IMAP protocol. That will keep your Gmail account’s email in sync with (WHS) Outlook just fine, but it can be a bit slow and clunky at times.
I hope that explains things a bit.
– MIKE
Hi
There is an inexpensive ($20 aprox) program that runs on windows desktop and syncs google calendar, contacts, tasks and notes to desktop Outlook (which in turn syncs it to Exchange Server).
It is called gsyncit from Fieldstone Software.
Hi Hunter,
Unfortunately, that program won’t work with WHS Outlook because more than likely it has been designed to run as a stand-alone desktop application or Outlook add-in. When using WHS Outlook, the main Microsoft Outlook application is installed directly on your home server and not on any of your client desktops. Therefore, in order to function properly on your home server, the program would need to be able to run as a background service on the server instead of as a simple desktop application or Outlook add-in.
– MIKE
hey mike, i tried configuring this with my blackberry but it keeps saying device not support. would you now how to fix this? i have a blackberry 8900
Hi windows live help,
Alas, I’m afraid that I’ve never used a BlackBerry and so I’m not exactly sure how you would go about configuring it to work with Exchange ActiveSync (EAS). Since RIM has their own proprietary synchronization protocol (called “BlackBerry Connect”, “BlackBerry Enterprise Server” or something like that???), I’m not sure that they actually support Microsoft’s EAS protocol (as most other smartphones do). Without the use of EAS, you won’t be able to sync WHS Outlook with your mobile device as described in the article/write-up.
I’m sorry that I don’t have a better answer for you on this one.
– MIKE