The Entourage User's WebLog

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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