Corporate Addressbook – now available on the Android market

My first Android app (Corporate Addressbook) is now available on the Android market.

I wrote this app since my Nexus One lacks a feature that I really needed – a true GAL lookup. The Global Address List (GAL) lookup currently available in vanilla Android (Froyo running on my Nexus One) is quite limited in functionality. It only looks up email addresses and does not return anything more. This is quite frustrating when you are trying to look up the address book for the contact information of a colleague. The only other option was to buy Touchdown. Touchdown is a great app, however it does much more than GAL lookups. It also fetches email and does a bunch of other things that are now included in Froyo. Hence I thought it was better to write this application to meet my requirement.

This application looks up the GAL and returns ALL data that is available on the Exchange server for the query. The app uses the ActiveSync protocol to communicate with the Exchange server, and supports both Exchange 2003 and 2007.

The source for this app is available on Google Code, and is available via the Apache 2.0 license.

Download it while it is hot 🙂

Appbrain
Android Market

Please do let me know if you come across and bugs / issues or if you have any comments.

20 thoughts on “Corporate Addressbook – now available on the Android market”

  1. @Shilpa: Let’s say you use a combination of Exchange and Outlook at work. You might have used the feature within Outlook where if you receive an email from someone at work, you double click their name, and their entire contact information pops up. Similarly when you type in a name in the To field and press Ctrl + K, outlook shows you a list of people who match the name, and you can select a name from that list. This is called a GAL lookup. This app does the same thing, but for a mobile device. The default Android build only provides email addresses when you type in a name. You are out of luck if you are looking for a phone number or office location. This app returns all the information present in Exchange against that name.

  2. I keep getting Error Connecting to server when trying to connect to my Google Apps account. Do you know why?

  3. Hi Bella

    Thank you for your message and trying out my app. Though Google Apps does support ActiveSync, it looks like they do not support it completely ( Microsoft’s Remote Connectivity Analyzer shows validation errors with Google Apps) . I will see if I can get it to work with Google Apps in the next release. I can send you an email, if I can get this working.

  4. Hi vivek. This app shows great promise but it keeps force closing. I can reinstall and it would work for like an hr and then messes up again. I’m using android 2.2 on an original droid.

  5. Hi Vivek,

    I keep getting the “force close” error. It’s fixed by reinstalling, but will mess up again within 30 minutes of reinstall. Great app if you could fix that error.

    I’m on android build frg22d, and the version of ur app i downloaded is the 1.1.3.

    Thanks.

  6. Hi Sean

    Thank you for your message. The next time it crashes, can you perhaps send a report to Google. That way I can see the stack trace. Also that will allow me to create a debug build that I can use to debug the issue (provided you are willing to install a debug build 🙂 )

    Thanks
    Vivek

  7. Hi,
    when does this App support GAL for Exchange 2010 ?
    Because I cannot connect to my server.

    thanks, David

  8. Hey David

    Thank you for your message. I am working on adding support for 2010. Unfortunately I do not have access to a 2010 Exchange server, and am unable to install it since 2010 has very stringent hardware requirements . Anyway I should be able to get this done sometime soon.

    Thanks
    Vivek

  9. After entering Domain\username, pwd, server I got msg “Error connecting to server. Please check your settings. Error code=0. Any Idea?

  10. Hi Rick

    Can you please try the 1.1.7 beta1 release?

    This build that takes the headers that are retrieved from the Exchange server and sends them to me via email.

    Please note

    • The email does not get sent to me automatically.
    • You can see and edit the contents of the email before you hit send. That way you can be assured that I am not acquiring any of your personal information.
    • Also if you like the source code for this release, you can see it here

    You will need to enable installation of applications from Unknown sources in order to install the beta release
    Home -> Settings -> Applications -> Unknown Sources -> Check

    Thanks
    Vivek

  11. Hi,

    After updating to the most recent version (1.1.6) the search function doesn’t work anymore. I get the following error: ActiveSync version=12.1 java.lang.NullPointerException. It doesn’t matter what I search for, I get this error everytime. Before the update everything worked fine. I’m not sure which version I used before the update, but probably the version relased before 1.1.6 because I keep my apps up-to-date. Is there a way to revert back to the old version?

    Best regards, Ron

  12. Hi Ron

    Sorry to hear that 1.1.6 did not work for you. Can you perhaps try the 1.1.6.4 (beta) version from here http://code.google.com/p/corporateaddressbook/downloads/list. I think this should fix the issue you are experiencing. If that does work, I you can switch to the market version once I release the final version to the market.

    P.S. You will need to enable installation of applications from Unknown sources in order to install the beta release
    Home -> Settings -> Applications -> Unknown Sources -> Check

    Thanks
    Vivek

  13. Thanks so much – just installed your app – this is just what I needed. I have LG Optimus V and was unable to find contacts in the Outlook Directory when I needed them (don’t know how to do that in Froyo). Your app did the trick. Thanks a lot!

  14. Very cool app – and just what I needed for my phone! Thanks for writing and publishing it.

  15. It doesn’t work on my S2. When trying to setup it sayes “Connection to server failed with error code:0 Error Detail: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Hostname may not be null”. 🙁 The Android version is 2.3.4.

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