How to Configure Alerting on TouchDown for Android

I have had a Blackberry attached to my hip for longer than I care to remember (before that it was a motorolla pager, yick). As a systems administrator, email alerting from exchange has been a functionality that I must have working without too many issues or too much hassle. Missing an alert email to 4 am is just not an option.

However the call of an real smart phone was just too much for me and I decided to get rid of my blackberry and get the HTC G2, after talking to several folks who use TouchDown for connecting to Exchange. More about touchdown here.

Installing TouchDown from the Android Marketplace is simple as can be and the initial configuration via ActiveSync is also pretty easy and well documented so i will not go into that here.

So onto Custom Alerting...

My alerting rules are actually pretty simple.

1. No alerts of any kind on standard emails
2. Alerts on emails from certain individuals
3. Alerts on email to our on-call email address

To setup your custom alerts, navigate to the "Advanced" tab under settings and make sure that "Notify on new mail" is selected. 

Then scroll to the bottom of the page click on "Email Alerts" and select "No notifications" ( I know, this did not make sense to me at first either). Then click on "Manage Rules" and add a rule with the "New Rule..." button.

Pick a name for your rule such as "Oncall Email"  and set the "Message Rule Type" to "Contains String/Email Address". Select "Search To" and enter the email address in the "Search String". For example, you might enter "alerts@mycompany.com".

Then click "Custom Notification" and select "Custom settings". Here you configure sounds, lights, and vibrations for your custom alerts. I usually check "Play Sound" and "Custom Sound" and "Nag untill cancelled". At the very bottom you can select the specific sound to play...make sure its particularly annoying. Make sure to save and test your new custom alerting rule.

Setting up and email alert for emails from certain individuals is also pretty much the same as above, except you will select "Search from" when setting up the search string. Remember to use full email addresses, and not just names.

There might be an easier way to do this, but my setup works without issues, unless OWA is down and thats another issue entirely.

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Robby Acosta]

Do you know if there is a way to set a time period for notifications? Say you want the notifications throughout the day, however during the night, you want touchdown notifications to be silent. Do you know of a way to do this?

[Fatmin]

I do not think that Touchdown can do alerting based on time. I have heard of a few other email applications for android and they may be able to accomplish this, however I think that you should look into a profile manager that works in conjunction with your email app. The profile manager should be able to override all alerting settings based on time of day.... I would hope.

[Bre]

Touchdown only supports .ogg. Ok, fine. I converted my .mp3 to an .ogg then put it in the directory that it wants .../media/audio/notifications, however, it doesn't show my newly added custom sound in the dropdown. Anyone know what's going going on here?

[Justin]

I want all notification to continue, I just want it to do so without the annoying noise. Any ideas on how to do that?

[Jeremy]

RE: Bre,
How did you add the files to that path? I cannot see it when I am connected to my computer. I have "show hidden files" enabled.

[Insomnic]

You can create a folder on the SDcard as /sdcard/media/audio/notifications (/audio/ringtones and /audio/alarms will give you those items too) and you can edit the custom sound path in the Touchdown rule to that location and then you can choose mp3, ogg, or m4a files as your ringers.

The preview ring/notification will be short but when the real notification kicks in it will play the whole thing. This is good if you want multiple beeps but don't want to use "nag" function; you can use Audacity to create a 3 or 5 repeating notification to simulate the BB "ring 3" or "ring 5" feature.

[Rob]

Thank you very much! I could not figure out why notifications were not sounding, setting touchdown as you described did the trick for my pages..

[Stephen]

Thanks - was getting annoyed by the notifications on every email. This description helped me to quickly set up notifications for just those critical emails.