The Entourage User's WebLog

I'm really grateful for all my faithful followers who have made this we site such a success. I enjoy writing the articles, but wish I had more time to spend on this site.

However, with the pages now receiving thousands of hits per week, the time has come to move the site to a better host than mac.com. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing 'wrong' with the Apple Homepages, but they aren't really designed for sites receiving such a lot of hits. My scripts page also get quite a lot of downloads, adding to the bandwidth the site is absorbing.

So, with immediate effect, this site has been replicated at a new homepage: www.barryw.net. The address for the EUWeblog is to be www.barryw.net/weblog/. This site is hosted by ORCSweb, a full blown commercial level web hosting service. Hopefully, this will allow me to develop the site as I would like to see it develop.

These pages will remain at this address for some time to come, but will eventually disappear. However, no more entries will be added to this site. all the new content will be found at the new address for The Entourage User's Weblog. If you have the RSS Feed bookmarked, please update your bookmark to point to the new location: http://www.barryw.net/weblog/files/euweblogfeed.xml.

thanks for reading, I hope I don't loose you as a reader, but please follow the links to the new location.
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Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.

So, you noticed those ads appearing in the sidebar?

There's no sinister reason behind it, I'm just testing things out. I need to justify the amount of time I spend on this site, in answering direct mail that comes to me from visitors to the site and on my support work in the newsgroups. Google AdSense is supposed present some discreet ads to goods or services based on the content of the page they are displayed on. I get a (very small) payout for any ads that are clicked on. In a few months time, I may get a cheque from Google, if enough people are interested in the ads' content. Any money received will go towards supporting this site (it is getting to the point where I am goign to have to move it off the dot mac servers to a dedicated site of its own) and the other free support work I do.

The ads are intended to be non-intrusive, they are promised to be non-offensive. If you have any comments or feedback to make about them, let me know. I'll be tweaking the display and content over the next few weeks. If I decide I don't like them they'll be dissapearing all together.

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Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.

The Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) at Microsoft are setting about redesigning the Mactopia web site. If you want to help in this process, take a look at this web page and spend 5 minutes or so classifying various topics that may (or may not) appear on the new web site.

It's a simple little 'usability' task that will allow them to arrange the web site so that most people will find the things they want easy to get at. There's no real reward for doing it, other than a nice warm fuzzy feeling that you could be helping your fellow mac users
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Update 2006-06-13 13:30

It seems that there has been such a response that the survey is now closed as they got all the help they needed!

Quicker than I expected, but so it goes!
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Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.

I've mentioned before that the Microsoft Public Newsgroups are the best places to get freindly help when things aren't running weel, or just to learn more about the programmes you are interested in.

Many of the questions posted in the newsgroups are answered by Microsoft MVPs - these are volunteers, not employees of Microsoft, but awarded MVP recognition for their voluntary contributions to the microsoft community and their help to users of Microsoft Products.

You can see a brief resumé of the Macintosh MVPs on the Mactopia web site

This is the full transcript of Roz Ho's talk at the Macworld '06 Keynote speech:

"Thanks Steve – I seem to have misplaced my white suit this morning! Still, white was never my colour, so that's ok.

It's a pleasure to be onstage again and to be part of all the exciting things coming out of MacWorld today.

I'm happy to say that the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit is on track to deliver Universal Binaries of Office and Messenger, and we've made a lot of progress already. We've worked closely together with Apple's Engineering team to make sure that we have the tools we need to deliver great new versions of Office for mac, but in the meantime we've also worked together to make sure that current versions of Office run well in Rosetta. Our dedication to the platform and to you our customers, is evidenced by our ongoing product update and today is no exception. We'll be shipping several updates to our suites very soon to satisfy user requests and to provide additional support for current Apple technologies.

We'll be adding Sync Services to allow data syncing between hand held devices and Entourage. We're putting the finishing touches on smart card and spotlight support for Entourage. We're also providing... [applause] - I said "satisfy many user requests, I guess that was the, er..., evidence.

We're also shipping another update to Messenger 5.

All of these updates will be available via free download from our website in March.

Throughout the end of January, we're partnering with Apple to provide our customers around the world with up to 50% off Office when you buy a new mac. There's never been a better time to upgrade your machine and your office.

Just in case all of that wasn't proof enough of our commitment, we're marking another milestone in our relationship with Apple. We're formalising our commitment to this platform and to our customers with an official agreement that we continue shipping new versions of office for Mac for a minimum of five years.

[Loud applause and cheering]

I said many times that Office for Mac is an incredibly successful product. 2005 was the best year for MacBu's Business. This official commitment should leave no doubt in your mind that we're here to stay and we're in it for the long term."

Another five years - that's at least two major office updates

Now thats Great news.

At Macworld SanFrancisco earlier today, Roz Ho (General Manager of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit) shared the stage with Steve Jobs and promised Entourage users great new features!

Microsoft are to release an update to entourage by March that will feature Spotlight Searching, Sync Services Integration and Smart card Support. Woohoo!

The Keynote can be watched here. If that links moves in the next few days, start from here. Roz can be seen about 1 hour and 12 minutes into the presentation.

Confusion often arises about the contents of the left hand column in an Entourage 'Browser' window - the column that contains the folder listings.


Looking something like the image on the left, several items appear in there, and their differences are not always immediately apparent.

At the top of the list should be an item titled "Folders on My Computer". This is intended to be self explanatory. It is the local store for mail that is downloaded to your copy of Entourage. Normally such mail comes from POP mail accounts, where the mail is deleted from the server after receipt by Entourage, but there are exceptions to this generality. In here, you will find your local Inbox, Outbox etc. Six items a created there by default: Inbox, Drafts, Outbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items and Junk E-mail. You can create as many folders as you like under the 'Folders on My Computer' heading. Alternatively, you can create a full hierarchy almost as many levels deep as you need of the default folders or any folders you have created.

After the "Folders on My Computer" heading, you will have an apparently randomly sorted list of your on-line mail accounts. This includes IMAP, Exchange & Hotmail accounts. These have different icons to show what sort of accounts they are. In my example, the Mac.Com & MVPS.ORG accounts are IMAP, the Exchange & Hotmail accounts identify themselves. Each of these accounts will include its own default folders, normally Inbox, Outbox, Sent Items and Deleted Items as a minimum. These folders hold the local cache of messages that are on the server, so you can still read and reply to the messages even when you are off-line (you may need to change the account settings to download the full messages instead of just message headers when connected though).

Next, after all the mail accounts appear the News accounts. Entourage is a useful, if somewhat basic, Newsgroup client as well as a mail client. The Microsoft News Server is configured by default, but you can add as many of your own as you like. Your ISP will normally provide access to at least one news server. It is worth setting up the default Microsoft News Server to access the Mac Groups - click on the news server icon (first time you do this, you will have to download the full newsgroup list, which may take a few minutes). Then, type 'public.mac' into the little filter window at top right of the screen:

You should be rewarded by a much reduced list of newsgroups relevant to the macintosh platform. Select the item for 'microsoft.public.mac.entourage' and click the 'Subscribe' button. This newsgroup will now appear as a sub-item of the Microsoft News Server icon in the folder listing and you can access messages in that group at any time by selecting that item. Very useful for quick and easy access to expert help and assistance!

Anyway, back on track...

There's one more item in the listing after the Newsgroups - "Mail Views". In earlier versions of Entourage this item used to be called "Custom Views". These are like saved 'Advanced Find' windows. A feature that predates Mail.App's 'Smart Folders' and works in similar ways. A few default 'mail views' are set up by default, but you can soon set up some more of your own. The beauty of these views is that they update in real time. So, if you open on in its own window (double-click on the entry in the list), even though it may take a few minutes to search the entire mail database for matches initially, it will automatically stay up to date as new mail matches the criteria you set up. For example, open a view that searches for mail that arrived 'Today', and new mail will be added as it arrived. this can be a useful view to keep open when you have lots of mail arriving which is usually sorted into different folders as it arrives - it acts as a central summary off all the day's mail.

That's all for today, perhaps I'll do a full article on newsgroups soon. Please pass your comments via the links below, and feel free to request articles if there's something you want me to write about.

Owen Linzmayer wrote an excellent article pointing out the ten top things in Entourage he hated. I have to say that he's right on the money with these! the article is well researched, clealry written and not at all an example of the all too common 'Microsoft Bashing'.

Now I prefer using Entourage to all the other mail & PIM apps out there, and I could probably write (though maybe not as eloquently) a 'top ten hates' about Mail.app, Eudora, Powermail & Thunderbird, all of which I have used from time to time. Is Entourage perfect? Far from it! For my money, it's the best of the bunch, but they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. You, the user, have to make up your ownn list of priorities and decide which mail client best meets those needs.

So, why does Entourage have this many shortcomings? Don't the developers care? Is it a conspiracy on behalf of "Micro$haft" (sic) to kill the mac platform? I can state for a fact, that the developers do care. In the dealings I am privileged to have with them through being an MVP, I can testify to their commitment to Office for Mac and the Macintosh platform. The shortcomings are there because they have to continually trade off between the features they want to include and the resources they have available. You see, The MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit) is only a small group, but is has a reasonable degree of autonomy to put what they want into their products. However, they have to stand and fall by their own products and are expected to return a profit to the parent company - much like any large mutlinational organisation expects the same of it's product divisions. If the Macintosh market was as large as the windows office market then I am sure that the team would be just as large and well resourced as Office for Windows is. however, that isn't the real world and MacBU have to do what they can with the resources at their disposal. I for one think they do a terrific job.

So, thanks Owen Linzmayer for an excellent article. I hope it gets the coverage it deserves, because far from damaging entourage and the MacBU, I beleive that constructive criticism makes for a stronger product as the development team is spurred on to even greater efforts.

(Article edited 02/02/2006 to correct some glaring spelling errors!)

What do you think? Please use the 'comments' link below to let me know.

"What's the 'Database Daemon'?" do I hear you ask?

Hardly surprising if you did, because users don't normally come across it. In fact, they're not meant to! A Daemon is a little application without a user interface that carries out some important maintenance task unseen to the user. Here's Wikipedia's definition.

The Database Daemon is a little utility that handles all the interaction with the Microsoft Office Database. It is the Daemon that writes mail into the database, extracts information from it for display etc. Every time you tell Entourage (or one of the other Office applications) to do something with the data, it asks the Daemon to do it. The Daemon was introduced in Entourage vX as a major enhancement to the stability and security of the database. Because it's a 'one trick pony', it is far easier to make it bug free than an application like Entourage, which has a thousand other functions. This gives the developers much more chance of writing the data to the database, or reading from it, without introducing any errors through bugs in their code.

The Daemon also keeps running after other office applications have been quit (if you have Notifications turned on in the Entourage preferences) so that you can get alerts from calendar events.

So, why do you need to worry about the Daemon? - Simple answer is that you don't. Need to worry, that is. However, there are circumstances where you may want to stop the Daemon. For example, you, being a good computer user, want to back up your Office Database. Now you may think it's a simple matter of copying the database to a CD, DVD or network location. However, what if the database is modified while you are in the middle of copying it? This is a definite possibility if the Daemon is still running. Also, all programmes write to disk by storing the data in a 'file buffer' - a portion of memory dedicated to this task - then when the buffer is full the data is written out in a stream of known size. It is possible that some changes (or even parts of some changes) may still be queued up in the file buffer within the Daemon and not written to the Database file on the disk. So, it is entirely possible that the copy of the database you have just taken for a back up could be corrupted! The simple solution is to quit the daemon first. This will cause the daemon to write all of it's data to disk first, and you also know that the daemon will not be modifying the database as you take your copy.

That's the theory, now how do you do it? There are several methods:

First, it's important that no other Office applications are running when you quit the daemon. They will crash otherwise.

• Open the application "Activity Monitor" (it lives in the /Applications/Utilities folder). If no window opens then choose 'Activity Monitor' from the Window menu.
  Type 'Daemon' (without the quotes) into the filter box, and select the Database Daemon in the short list of processes that will be left.
  Click the 'Quit' button in the toolbar.
  Click 'Quit Application' in the confirmation dialog that pops up
• Open Entourage and under the 'Entourage' menu select 'Turn Off Notifications'
  Quit Entourage and the daemon will quit as well (assuming you obeyed the instruction to previously quit all office apps).
• Run this Applescript:
  tell application "Microsoft Database Daemon" to quit

That's it

More tomorrow...

There's a couple of other resources maintained by MVPs around the web. Most comprehensive is probably the 'Entourage Help Pages' maintained by Diane Ross (with contributions from many other MVPs). J. E. McGimpsey has some general Office:Mac Topics pages - he's mainly focussed on Excel, but has some good tidBits in there. Mickey Stevens also has some useful information at his web pages.

Then there's the newsgroups at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups and the Entourage:mac mailing list.

For 'Official' help, see 'Mactopia' - the Microsoft web pages dedicated to Office for Mac.

That's pretty much it really - unless anyone out there knows of any other good resources that users can turn to in their hour of need. Let me know if you do.

I decided to start this blog as a one-stop shop for many of the recurring themes that seem to trip up Users of Microsoft Entourage (the eMail, Calendar & PIM application for Microsoft Office for Mac) from time to time.

Don't get me wrong, Entourage is a great app, is robust and easily used and performs well for most people, most of the time. However, like all applications, it has it's quirks, and some people seem to run into problems that don't plague the majority of users.

So, the entries in this blog are the result of common posts to the two main user forums for Entourage - the Entourage:Mac mailing list, and the Microsoft Public Entourage Newsgroups

I hope you enjoy them, and find them useful. If you do, tell other people (and, if you don't, please tell me!).