Hi,

I am doing a bit of research for work.

We have been proposed an upgrade from our current 02 XDA's to win 7 phones. We all want to use them to sync our outlook contacts, calendar, notes, tasks etc but from the outside it looks as though you have to have a hotmail/windows live account to do this?

Does anyone have experience of doing this and is it true you need the hotmail account?

Work will not allow us to have a hotmail account due to the network security but on the other side of the coin we do not want to have a phone which will not sync with our contacts etc.

Thanks

Tom

They can sync against Exchange, so if you run that in your office environment that should be fine....

I have one I use for personal use, so I signed up for a new hotmail account, and then use the MS Hotmail Connector which allowed my to sync my calendar/contacts into Hotmail from my Outlook 2007/2010 installs at home, and then they appear on the phone. I sync my mail onto the phone via imap.

This means that on all my machines I now have the same unified contact list for emails, postal addresses, etc

From what i've read, WP7 isn't really the right phone OS for you yet (and i say that as a WP7 owner myself).

Pretty much everything is tied heavily into hotmail, and although i imagine you'll be able to do most of the stuff you want, i don't think it'll be as easy, as it would be with a hotmail account.

I think WP7 is currently a good personal mobile phone, but not really ready for the business world. I believe the 'mango' update due this autumn is sheduled to start adding some of the business features people need from WP7.