Android tutorial / Ref : to access contacts, email and contacts using exchange activesync?

Question

I planed to develop android app to sync outlook exchange contacts and mail to myapp. I googled it but not get any tutorial regarding that. I only gets the result to setup active sync and other third party apps. Any one please guide me to understand

1. whats exchange active sync? Is there any library to access outlook exchange.
2. Is there tutorial to write android/java program to access outlook exchange (exchange activesync).
3. is there any open source project?

I may misunderstood the about exchange activesync.. please guide me to complete my project by referring good tutorials/blogs to completely understand this concepts..

Thank you,

Answer 1

Question 1 & 2 and 3: Well, the best tutorial/example would be the already existing Exchange sync adapter provided by Google I guess. This is also an open-source (Apache license) project.

This one is for ICS, where you should start by checking out the following sections:

From the AndroidManifest.xml we can see that com.android.exchange.EmailSyncAdapterService, com.android.exchange.ContactsSyncAdapterService and com.android.exchange.CalendarSyncAdapterService all implement the SyncAdapter API, thus providing you with a starting point for your search.

If you need code from Gingerbread (or earlier) you should check the GIT for the Email app which used to house the Exchange sync adapter previously.

Answer 2

I believe the best resource about exchange activesync is http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998357.aspx
Further AFAIK microsoft holds multiple patents and requires license to implement the client software, so i dont think there are any open source implementations.
For this exact reason even google provides a very limited support for exchange server on android