One of the most common requests from readers of my iPhone and iPad Exchange ActiveSync guides is support for synchronization of tasks. Added in Exchange Server 2003 SP2, wireless synchronization of tasks has not been consistently implemented by mobile devices. Android doesn’t have it, and neither does Windows Phone 7 (yet). But iOS 5 will indeed include wireless, over-the-air synchronization of Exchange tasks using ActiveSync.
iOS 5 will be released in the Fall and includes many new features, including Apple’s own “to-do sharing” feature. But Tasks are commonly used in enterprise environments, and it’s nice to see Apple integrate this feature. It’s been conspicuously absent in iOS for years, even as Palm’s WebOS and Symbian supported it. Interestingly, Microsoft’s own Windows Phone 7 removed the task support previously found in version 6!
That is definitely a good news! I still can’t find a solution for syncing Exchange 2003, iphone, mac os and have web access to them, too. All solutions miss something. And it breaks the whole system. I hope this would be an answer.
Would Mac OS Lion have a task manager app which would sync to iCloud?
I have only just found this post and I am very glad to see it! Like it or not, Exchange is very prevalent in most medium to large organisations globally, so any device I want to use as my mobile office needs to integrate well with Exchange. One thing which Microsoft Outlook does very well is support the GTD (Getting Things Done, David Allen) way of working, whereby an email is flagged and becomes a task, and then that task is dragged to the calendar and becomes a block of time where you will work on the task – all on one screen!
When I try to achieve this same workflow on the iPad – well, I haven’t found any elegant way of doing it at all. Certainly not in that seamless, fluid way that Outlook can. You have to start using three different apps and it just doesn’t work well.
I look forward to the day when there is a single screen on the iPad where I can do all the above, with two-way sync to my corporate Exchange environment. Then I wil truly be able to dispense with my laptop!
Yes… Android has this features…. Not natively, of course, but over apps….