Demo: Configuring and accessing #Office365 on an iPad

—UPDATE—

We’ve made a followup post to this one, showing Office 365′s SharePoint Online and Office Web Apps on an iPad: link

—/UPDATE—

The number of supported clients to access Office 365 services is one of the key improvement areas. Accessing services is supported through the usual Microsoft client software (Office, IE 7 and higher, etc.) but Safari 3.x and FireFox 3.x are also fully supported.

For a full overview of supported clients, please refer to an earlier blog post:
http://360on365.com/2010/10/31/office365-detailed-service-overview/

For mobile devices, like the iPad but also iPhone, Nokia and others, ActiveSync is the access protocol. BlackBerry is also supported, but that’s a different story.

Since I have an iPad I thought it might be nice to configure it to access an Office 365 for Enterprises mailbox.

Below are steps you need to perform to configure Office365 access on an iPad. My iPad is running iOS 4.2 btw and is not jailbreaked or anything.

If you’ve already configured your iPad for an On-Premise Exchange server in the past you’ll see that this is really no different. All you need is your username (e-mail address) and password and the configuration is done almost automatically.

Note that I did some spraypainting in the screenshots, this is not to hide any magic, but only to anonimize my details

1. Go to Settings, select Mail, Contacts, Calendar and press ‘Microsoft Exchange’:
   
2. Enter your e-mail address in the ‘Email’ and ‘Username’ fields and enter your Password in the ‘Password’ field. Optionally you can choose to add a description of this account
3. You might get a pop-up saying it cannot verify the identity of the server. Not sure if this is related to Office 365 being in Beta at the moment, but you can just select Continue to move ahead:
4. The iPad has now found the server through AutoDiscover and entered the servername in the Server field:
5. Now you can select which categories to synchronize. Note the absence of ‘Tasks’…this is an iPad limitation since it does not support Tasks. In my example I selected everything:
6. After this your done and can access the mailbox through normal means:
7. And just to verify I sent my self an e-mail from my iPad and read it on my iPad
   

And all done!