MWSF 2008: Notes about Entourage 2008

One of the big pain points for Mac users here at AK is dealing with Exchange. A lot of people are using Entourage 2004 (running in Rosetta on their Intel Macs), and while it works, it often behaves strangely or offers a "less than stellar" experience. So, one of my main missions at Macworld yesterday was to hit up the Microsoft booth, and see what I could find out about the latest version of Entourage. Here are my rough notes (captured using the "Notes" application on my iPhone):

Exchange support:

Can set an "out of office" message now
Focus when building Entourage 2008 was on "the basics" - stability and performance
Supports flagging of items, like Outlook
No attachments in calendar - but Entourage won't auto-delete invites that have attachments
Nothing new for going from outlook to entourage or vice versa

Things that are in also Entourage 2004 (but might be improved in 2008):

Can sync to address book and iCal - worked with apple to improve implementation
Can view shared calendars via "Open other user folder" menu item
Calendar sharing with exchange hasn't really changed - there is a "share calendar" menu option as in Entourage 2004
The Entourage database is still stored as one ginormous file - so Microsoft recommends that you tell Time Machine to exclude it from backups, and you better be careful with it, because all of your important data is in there...

New features:

There is a new "My Day" window, which is actually a separate application (thus it can be made to go in all Spaces).
Searching inside of Entourage has been completely changed - everything is now based on Spotlight. Saved searches (which can be arbitrarily complex) can be dragged to bookmarks bar ala Safari
"View message source" command moved to the message menu

All-in-all, it was hard for me to tell if this will be a must-have upgrade or not. If Microsoft has achieved their stated goal of delivering a more stable Exchange experience - I think that alone could be well worth the price of admission. It will be hard for me to judge this, however, because I have decided to eschew Entourage in favor of Apple Mail at work (which means I have to sacrifice calendaring, and going to meetings. I'm not too broken up about it).

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Entourage 2008, Mail

One of the big pain points for Mac users here at AK is dealing with Exchange. A lot of people are using Entourage 2004 (running in Rosetta on their Intel Macs), and while it works, it often behaves strangely or offers a \"less than stellar\" experience. So, one of my main missions at Macworld yesterday was to hit up the Microsoft booth, and see what I could find out about the latest version of Entourage. Here are my rough notes (captured using the \"Notes\" application on my iPhone):\n\n

Can set an \"out of office\" message now
Focus when building Entourage 2008 was on \"the basics\" - stability and performance
Supports flagging of items, like Outlook
No attachments in calendar - but Entourage won't auto-delete invites that have attachments
Nothing new for going from outlook to entourage or vice versa

Can sync to address book and iCal - worked with apple to improve implementation
Can view shared calendars via \"Open other user folder\" menu item
Calendar sharing with exchange hasn't really changed - there is a \"share calendar\" menu option as in Entourage 2004
The Entourage database is still stored as one ginormous file - so Microsoft recommends that you tell Time Machine to exclude it from backups, and you better be careful with it, because all of your important data is in there...

There is a new \"My Day\" window, which is actually a separate application (thus it can be made to go in all Spaces).
Searching inside of Entourage has been completely changed - everything is now based on Spotlight. Saved searches (which can be arbitrarily complex) can be dragged to bookmarks bar ala Safari
\"View message source\" command moved to the message menu

\n\nAll-in-all, it was hard for me to tell if this will be a must-have upgrade or not. If Microsoft has achieved their stated goal of delivering a more stable Exchange experience - I think that alone could be well worth the price of admission. It will be hard for me to judge this, however, because I have decided to eschew Entourage in favor of Apple Mail at work (which means I have to sacrifice calendaring, and going to meetings. I'm not too broken up about it).\n\n-Andy.\n\nTechnorati Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Entourage 2008, Mail\n

Andy Reitz (blog)

MWSF 2008: Notes about Entourage 2008