Understanding Exchange/Entourage Issues

[sfscott]

I am new to the Mac world.

I run my personal world on Outlook 2008 and Exchange on a Lenovo/Vista Business platform, and it works fine, including with ActiveSync and my iPhone.

I am thinking of getting a Mac and want to understand what if any issues I might encounter using Entourage with Exchange. Using Outlook with Parallels kind of defeats the purpose.

I have heard that you cannot use.pst files. How does data get imported?

 

[nadyne]

Entourage will just download your mail, contacts, and calendar from Exchange.

If you've got data archived in PSTs (that is, old data that is no longer stored on Exchange but is only available in your PSTs) that you want to access, Entourage does not currently have this ability. There are some third-party solutions available; the Entourage MVPs have documented several options.

What features of Outlook do you rely on the most?

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[sfscott]

Most used features

I am a heavy email, calendar and contacts user. I pass calendar invites back and forth between my home machine and my work machine (Dell/XP/Office2003).

I also will mail vCards around. As far as .pst files go, I do not archive items anymore as I find that problemmatic, but I will import .pst files, such as an office contact list or as a way to update my contacts from one machine to the other without re-entering data.

I use a fair number of email folders. I also keep note on the notes tab, but understand that those won't sync.

I don't do tasks, journals or heavy rule-based filtering.

Seeing as you are from MSFT, if I have everything stored on my hosted exchange server, would I simply configure login details for Entourage, and have my data replicate on the client side automatically?

And since MSFT made Office combatible on both platforms, why can't Outlook be ported?

 

[MisterMe]

If your calendar and contacts are on the server--and they should be, then you should have no problems with them. Calendar invitations just work. Exchange does not pickup the names of my Entourage mailing lists although the lists themselves remain intact. My experience with vCards is that Outlook does not handle them nearly as well as the Mac.

As to your last question, Microsoft developed and released Outlook 2001 as a freeware Exchange client. It looks like like a very amateurish effort, but it works. However, it renders HTML mail poorly. Oh yes, it is MacOS 9 only.

 

[nadyne]

Seeing as you are from MSFT, if I have everything stored on my hosted exchange server, would I simply configure login details for Entourage, and have my data replicate on the client side automatically?

Yes, that's correct. If you're on Exchange 2007, you don't need to do much configuration -- Entourage 2008 with the latest updates will automatically discover the Exchange settings. We just released 12.1.3 today, which includes a couple of additional improvements to our automatic discovery support of Exchange, so keeping on top of updates is a good idea.

And since MSFT made Office combatible on both platforms, why can't Outlook be ported?

Outlook has a lot of deep system ties to Windows, which makes porting the code somewhere between really difficult and essentially impossible. Porting isn't a magic wand, anyway -- there's an immense pile of work necessary to get ported code to work on the OS to account for different APIs, OS architecture, etc etc etc.

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[toonnyc]

Entourage is a waste of time. Everyone involved with it should be embarassed that they can't deliver a proper e-mail app to their customers, especially when Outlook is sitting right there, telling them what to do. Can't wait to get rid of it and the rest of Office for Mac off of my 100 Mac user's machines.