The Entourage User's WebLog

Microsoft have released v11.3 of Office. According to the update, this is what it contains:

"This update contains several updates to enhance security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code. In addition, this update includes all of the improvements released in all previous Office 2004 updates."

There are the usual warnings about Exchange accounts on the web page as well, so read them first: Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.0

Note that the Entourage application itself has not been updated, although several support files have, so that is still showing version 11.2.5 the update has been applied. This is nothing unusual (not every update touches every file) and nothing to worry about.

This update also rolls up all previous updates, so it acts as a "Combo Updater" and should update any previous version of Office 2004.

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Don't get me wrong, I love Entourage, but I'm getting frustrated.

It seems to me that Entourage is accumulating lots of little niggles. Nothing big enough, on its own, to cause tne to questio why I use Entourage, but the accumulation of them is driving me nuts!

Here's my list of current pet peeves:

Entourage Hangs

At odd moments through the day, Entourage freezes up. This can last from a few seconds to about 10 minutes. I start doing something and the beach ball comes up. And stays up. Nothing responds, nothing happens. Other apps work just fine, Activity Monitor shows the Daemon & Application running normally and consuming very little processor capacity. This is particularly noticeable about 3 minutes after starting Entourage up, but it can happen at any time through the day. I haven't been able to pin down any reproducible steps, but when I do, you can be sure I'll use the 'Send Feedback' link under the Help menu!

Very slow to open Complex HTML

It's frustrating to have to wait 5 or 6 seconds for a mail to be displayed after you select it. This applies to those 'newsletter' type of emails mostly, but I'm also on a couple of Yahoo Group mailing lists, and they have now started sending complex HTML and their messages display the same annoying delays. The same mails in Mail.App and Eudora open almost instantly - why does Entourage have to be the poor relation?

'Download Pictures' gets lost

I have the option to download linked images in emails turned off by default. So, if I get a mail where I do want to see the images, I have to click on 'Download Pictures'. No problem so far, I like the ability to pick & choose which images get downloaded. However, a small percentage of messages loose this link. Most frustratingly it happens to messages where I have previously downloaded images, but when I go back to that message the images have disappeared and so has the Download link. There seems to be no way to get the pictures back. Again, this doesn't happen every time, but often enough to get my goat.

Too Slow Searching

v11.2.5 brought in Spotlight searching, which is fast, but coarse. By this, I mean that I can't limit my searches to a particular folder (or set of folders), or limit by date range or anything like that. Eudora has lightning fast searches - it can scan through half a million messages in about 4 seconds. Entourage takes about 15 minutes to do the same (if I am doing a search on 'body content'). In mail (which can limit searches to selected mailboxes, even though it is using Spotlight) goes one better. It not only finds the mail before i finished typing the search words, it highlights the appearance of the search p-hrase in the email itself. Nice touch, Apple.

Exchange Certificates

I'm an expert in Entourage. I have the badge to prove it. But, can I get Entourage to connect to our Exchange server without throwing up an error (three times!) about "correct certificate not installed"? No, I can't. I have scoured the help sites and read the white papers and asked everyone I know, but I still get the errors every time Entourage first connects to the server

Database Corruption

To be fair, this doesn't happen too often - in about six years of using Entourage it's only happened to me twice, but that's twice too often. My data is valuable. Maybe not to anyone else, but certainly to me! Now, I run a larger database than most people (currently around 6Gb) and keep a lot of 'stuff' in there for convenience, but that's the way I like to work. I shouldn't suffer from potential data loss because of it (unless I am doing something the programme was never intended to do!). But, quite apart form positive corruption (when I get an error message saying the database is damaged), I have also had periods of instability which have been repaired by moving all my data over to a new database. This operation, including setting up Mailing List rules, schedules, folder structures and everything else, can take more than a week to complete. To _have_ to do this is really unacceptable.

No Customisable Interface

Of all the Office Apps, Entourage is the only one where you have to live with Microsoft's fixed interface. Sure, you can turn the toolbar on or off, but that's it. No way to make the programme look & feel like yours after that. After so long, this really isn't good enough. In Mail (like many well behaved Cocoa applications) you get the ability to modify the toolbar. In Eudora, you can change it completely - orientation, icons, functions, anything. I hope things improve in Office v12.

Exchange Support

Admittedly, support for Exchange servers has been improving with every new update, but Entourage is still a long, long way behind the functionality of Outlook. I need to use Exchange for work, I really want to be able to do all the things that Outlook can do. At the moment, although I can issue invitations to events, when people respond, their status is not updated in my copy of the event. I can only access shared address books and calendars if they are another user's default address books or calendars. Tasks & notes don't exist as far as the exchange server is concerned. There's lots of other issues too - far too many to mention here.

Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not thinking of abandoning Entourage any time soon. I still think it is the best option out there for a PIM - especially since I need Exchange connectivity. I just think there's lots of room for improvement. I'm sure the next version of Entourage will look completely different - the move to X-Code and Cocoa will have it's benefits (as well as its drawbacks). And, the wholesale change of the codebase, while making a mammoth task for them to accomplish in a relatively short time scale, does give the opportunity for other cool things to be introduced. Already there is a public beta of the next version of Office for Windows available, and that's got a completely new interface. Some of this must surely rub off on the mac version. I'm sure that Microsoft learned their lesson with Word v6, when they tried to do a straight port of the windows code (Word for Mac v6 was an abysmally slow and unstable application - the debacle led, fairly directly to the formation of the Macintosh Business Unit, dedicated to producing _good_ macintosh programmes), so I expect to see some of the same principles introduced, but hopefully in a Mac-Like way. What new features will be in there? Who can say at this stage? I hope that some of my bugbears will have been laid to rest. If you want to know a little more about how things are shaping up, there's some information in an interview published here. The interview was with Mary Starman, "Group Product Manager for the Macintosh Business Unit", and she's talking about how the next version will look and how they are progressing. Enjoy

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lease 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 macBU gets blogging! Although several MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit - the people in Microsoft who write the mac software) employees already write personal blogs, the Mac Mojo blog is the 'official weblog for the Office for Mac team at Microsoft' .

Take a look, and get an insight into what it's like to work on th eMac at Microsoft, some of the problems that developers have to tackle and much, much more.

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lease 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 Entourage address book is a great part of the programme. It is powerful, flexible and well integrated with the rest of the Office suite. However, switching to the address book view and looking for a name, or even having to fire up Entourage when you want to find an address can be a pain. Fortunately, there's an easier way!

Jonathan Nathan has written a great little utility called "Entourage AB Menu" that puts a little purple 'e' icon in the menu bar. Select this icon and you get a list of all your address book contacts, selectable by name, by category, by company, by geographical area etc. By drilling down these hierarchical menus (which work very quickly) you can select the contact you want.

Here stuff gets even more fancy, in the preferences, you can decide what happens when you select each type of data. By default, select the name and the contact opens in Entourage for editing; select the address and it is copied to the clipboard; select the phone number and it is dialled through the speaker etc.

There's lots of control over what the utility does, through the preferences window. In fact, there are so many options that the preferences window looks cluttered and a little overwhelming at first, but take your time and look through all the options one by one.

Installation is easy. Just download the disk image, then drag the application to your Applications folder (or anywhere else, come to that) and double-click it to make it run. Because its an application, there is no great interference with the OS and it appears to be rock-solid stable. First time you run it you get to set the prefs which includes an option to start the utility when you log in. EntourageABmenu is $10 shareware, but you get to use all the functions in an unregistered version for up to 30 minutes at a time - when the 30 minutes expires you can launch it again.

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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.

There have been a few questions about how well the Office suite runs under Rosetta on an Intel based mac.

Well, MacTech have published the results of a benchmark exercise comparing performance on a PowerBook G4 1.5GHz, a MacBook Pro 1.83GHz and a 20" iMac 2.0GHx Core Duo.

The good news is that, while there is a small performance hit, it's nothing serious.

Entourage is least affected (in fact, the iMac performed better than the PowerBook!), powerpoint most affected and word & excel about the middle.

The full report is here.

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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.

Earlier today Microsoft released update 11.2.4 for the Office Suite. It is available from either AutoUpdate (use 'Check for updates under the help menu) or as a separate download.

The only two applications to get updated are Powerpoint and Entourage - there is no change to Word or Excel (and, in fact, their version numbers remain at 11.2.3).

The update is billed primarily as a security update (full details available here), but a couple of other bug fixes are included, notably improvements to the handling of EPS graphics that could, in some cases, cause crashes or corruption. Also some documents that used German language will also now open correctly.

Before you rush in to install this update (a 54mb download - its a combo updater that includes several earlier updates as well), if you are using an Exchange account, make sure you read this KB article - there are some fairly rare circumstances where updating could cause data loss, but there is a pretty easy work-round to make it all safe.

Most important fix for Entourage users is that the complaint that some calendar items are not showing up in the entourage calendar (yet do when viewing the same account in Outlook) may be a thing of the past! This update is supposed to cure this issue. I'll check when I get back to work tomorrow and report any problems I find

The other Entourage fix is a crash that sometimes occurred when connecting to LDAP servers over SSL. Not a problem that I ever encountered, so I will probably be unable to comment on how good this fix is.

Now for the bad news - what's not in there! I blogged a little while ago about the 'time zone bug' that appeared in Entourage after an Apple update for the changes to the DST rules in several parts of the world. I said at the time that this was no big issue because it was a strictly cosmetic bug. Well, it seems that for people who synced their calendars to iCal AND to some external PDA/phones, it caused replication of events, shifting events by an hour, or even caused events to be deleted from their devices. Bad news, indeed. The worse news is that this bug hasn't been fixed in this release. Come on Microsoft, why not?

Happy downloading!

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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.

Earlier today Microsoft released the latest update to Microsoft Office 2004. It's been billed as '11.2.3 Update', and the applications get a minor 'dot' release - Entourage goes from v11.2.2 to 11.2.3. This small change in the numbers masks the significance of this release.

What's New?

Open up the application Preferences in Entourage and you will see two new preference panes under the 'General Preferences': "SyncServices" and "Spotlight" - WooHoo!!

Probably the two most frequent Feature Requests in the public forums have been 'Use (or sync with) Apple's Address Book' and 'Spotlight Searching' - this update addresses both of these requests. This is a major update for anyone using OS X Tiger (10.4.x)

One other feature that may prove useful to corporate users is that Entourage can now access tools built into Tiger (OPS X 10.4.x) that allow it to use smart card verification of users whose terminals are equipped with readers. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them, so I'll have to leave a review of this particular feature to others!

Spotlight

Lets look at Spotlight searching first.

Since Tiger was released, Spotlight has got better and better. In it's first incarnation, it was slow, had a tendency to spin the beach-ball for 5 minutes at a time, was a little erratic in what it found and used up oodles of processor cycles when it was indexing. Now (in 10.4.3) it is eminently useable. Some of these improvements have come from Apple, others from writers of Spotlight Plug -ins that have improved the way Spotlight indexes their files. Apple's own Mail.app used Spotlight from the first release of Tiger, and did a very good job too. So much so that Entourage users were jealous and kept clamouring for the same functionality. To achieve what they did, Apple had to change the way Mail.App stored it's data - massages had to be written out to individual files so Spotlight could index them and uniquely identify them. That would have been a step too far for the Entourage Database format, which is the main reason we didn't get Spotlight indexing until now.

Searching in Spotlight

After installing the update, turning on Spotlight Indexing and waiting a while for Spotlight to trawl through the database, simply open up the Spotlight search window and type in some text that you know is in one of your messages. Within seconds, you get a list of mail messages bearing a little 'Entourage Message' icon. Simply double-click the message in the Spotlight list and the original message opens in Entourage. Simple. Easy. Quick. Effective.

Now, to make things even better...
If you know what you want is a mail message, you can narrow the search to just mail messages by adding a 'kind' descriptor to your search text, like this: "Get Rich Quick kind:email" - now only email messages will be returned in the search. Other 'kinds' you can use are 'contact' and 'event'. Or, if you know roughly when you last used it, add a 'date' descriptor: 'date:yesterday', 'date:last week' etc. will narrow the search. These search keywords are documented in Apple's 'Spotlight Tips' page.

The Techy Stuff

If, after turning indexing on, you take a look in "~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Microsoft/" you will find a series of sub-folders holding individual files for all your database entries. Note that these are not exact copies of what is in your database, they are a summary file (labelled in the Finder as "Microsoft Entourage Message Pointer") in XML format. For emails they have stripped out all encoded attachments, HTML parts and other non-textual stuff. Information like subject, recipients, dates etc. is all included from the original, together with information that allows EntourageEntourage to find the original message when you double-click the Message Pointer in Spotlight.

Does this index take up masses of room? Not really. My Entourage database is over 3Gb in size, yet all this metadata is summarised in a little over 700Mb. Not too shabby at all.

Sync Services

No matter what you say, Apple's Address Book app does work well. It does integrate with a lot of other stuff on the Mac word and it will only become more pervasive, rather than less.

However, it does have it's shortcomings. As a simple contact manager, Entourage's Address Book has it beaten hands down. There are far more fields and features in Entourage than there are in Address Book.

Why Sync?

Because of the reasons expounded above, a lot of people would like to keep Entourage as their main Address Book, yet have the benefits of the system-wide access that Apple's Address Book enjoys. Or, maybe you have a PDA or phone that will co-operate well with Apple's Sync Services, but doesn't work well with Entourage & Palm Sync? Up until now your options were limited. You could move stuff over to iCal or Address Book by drag & Drop, but it is messy, time consuming, prone to failure and some data doesn't get transferred. Or, you could have used Paul Berkowitz' excellent suite of (shareware) Applescripts which did a far more thorough job, albeit rather slowly and without the best of interfaces (a limitation of Applescript, not Paul's abilities). Or, you could use a third party utility like E2Sync, but this has had mixed reviews - some people have no trouble, others no end of problems, there seems to be no middle ground. Now however, you can just turn on syncing in the Entourage preferences and wait a few minutes. The data in your default Entourage address book will be synced across to iCal, and to any other SyncServices aware application or device you have connected. When you first set up syncing, you will be asked whether you want one or other system to take priority, or whether you want the data in the two systems to be merged. After that, there is no other user interaction! Data entered into one device or application magically gets copied to the others within a minute or two. Beautiful.

Caveats

Some other sync programmes convert Entourage item's main category into the Calendar or Address Book Group in iCal or Address Book. Sync Services does not - all Entourage events will go into a single calendar called 'Entourage' in iCal and all Entourage contacts will go into a single Address Book group called 'Entourage'. Anything created in Address Book or iCal will be synced back to Entourage to appear with no category set at all. This is due to the differences in philosophy between Apple's 'calendars' and Entourages 'categories'. An event in iCal can only be in one calendar. However, in Entourage it can have many categories. The inherent possibilities for confusion between the two systems made Microsoft decide to restrict themselves to only one Calendar in iCal. Also, at the moment, only the main (default account's) calendar or address book will be synced. This may change in the future when multiple address books will be synced. If this were to happen, and Microsoft had followed the 'calendar=category" methodology, then they would have to redesign the way things worked - not something to be taken lightly.

Known Problems

• Contacts in Address Book with a middle initial will be duplicated when dot mac syncing is turned on - this is due to a bug in Apple's sync code, and there's not much that MS can do about it at this time.
• There have been some reports of syncing not working for some people. if this happens to you, follow these instructions:
  1. Quit Entourage, Safari, Address Book, iCal and the Microsoft Database Daemon (see my weblog entry on this topic).
  2. Open the application 'Activity Monitor' and use it to quit the process called 'SyncServer'
  3. Delete the contents of folder "~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices"
  4. Restart Entourage, Address Book, iCal & Safari
• Custom Fields 1 thru 8 in The Entourage Contacts will not be synced - this is a limitation of Apple's schema