In an excitement over upgrading the latest Android 4.4 KitKat, some developers sometimes forget that most users actually depend on their tablets and phones for work. In the professional world, mobile access to email is very important.

Many businesses and organizations rely on servers that run Microsoft Exchange or other software implementing such protocol to handle their calendar and email needs. Unfortunately, plenty of bugs in Android 4.4 KitKat's Exchange support leave a lot of users stuck without access to their employer's servers.

Several people report they are unable to set up a connection to their Exchange account, in spite of having issues with previous versions of Android before KitKat. These users are presented with an unhelpful error message saying "Can't connect to server." There is no particular theme among users suffering such problem but some people were able to resolve it using the "domainusername" syntax, instead of entering the email address.

If the user gets past the initial account setup and download his email, it can be a bit disconcerting that new messages don't seem to arrive. This leaves the user out of loop and likely to get a continuously repeating sync error that results to fast battery drain. This issue doesn't always appear immediately and can even take hours or days before the sync errors occur.

Users also suggest toggling sync off and back on, small changes to setting and reentering certificates but most of these only appear to refresh the connection for a short time before failing again. Various complaints seem to stem directly from how different each server is configured and software versions the users are running. There are corporate policies, certificates, firewalls and several other details and too many variables that affect the complaints.

So far issues seem to occur regardless of CA certificates, even if none are used. A new nag screen now turns up for some users, which is to be intentionally added by Google. If a user installs a private CA certificate for VON use or other privately encrypted networks, a warning message will likely greet him, saying "network may be monitored." This is not trouble except that each subsequent reboot will display another message saying "network may be monitored by an unknown third party." An engineer said it's intentional but others think this is bad behavior. See discussion here

Possible causes for this problem are corporate policies enforcing SD card encryption which you can resolve by asking the IT dept to create a slightly relaxed policy, newly created connections as opposed to existing certificates that continue to work without a problem, and using various 3rd party apps.

The easiest workaround is to simply switch from push to pull with reasonable interval. The phone will poll the server for updates, which is more data and processor intensive but more reliable. Another alternative is to switch to using the IMAP protocol. A lot of corporate servers support it as an alternative to Exchange. This is not for everybody as it will lose calendar support and other email features. The last option is using NitroDesk, Inc. or Emtrace Technologies, Inc. There's trial period but both charges $20 to unlock some features. It might be worth it if you want to run KitKat and work Exchange support at the same time.