The Entourage User's WebLog

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