[henryhbk]

Actually one other flaw, is that My Day doesn't seem to properly display all-day events. As a physician who works in the hospital, I note which service I am attending on for the day as an all-day event, and it doesn't show them on My Day.

[JMStafford]

The single database has been my pet peeve without Entourage since they introduced it to replace Outlook Express in 1998. I even went so far as to have a discussion with the Entourage Product Manager, and all I could conclude then was that he was a hopeless tool who didn't understand file corruption or back-up management.
I would also like to see support for Safari's Mail Contents of This Page and for using Rich HTML in forwards and replies.
For those people who like Mail, great. I thought about switching, but Apple needs to make a decent import tool for that to happen.

[501user]

Quote

I don't know why some reviewers insist on thinking of Apple Mail as suitable only for users with "lighter" email needs.

Absolutely, Mail, iCal, and Address Book are all very fine applications. If a company has Exchange well and good, but otherwise ... and for individuals it's no contest. In fact, any company that hasn't got tied in to Exchange is well off: it can get hold of Leopard server and use something that's both better and cheaper as well as being standards-compatible and open.

http://www.apple.com...tures/ical.html

This reviewer seems determined to talk Apple's products down for no good reason. This statement is just laughable:

Quote

Entourage provides a wealth of features that are deeper than Apple?s trio.

So I'm to reject good software solutions on the basis of a metaphor! That's simply astounding. Here "deeper" is just a metaphor, and the reviewer has given no good reason for preferring this product. I believe that's because he simply hasn't got one.

Besides all that, as you point out Apple Mail has a sensible and robust storage solution. There's also no unnecessary duplication of mailstores: "it [Entourage] replicates each message ... in your User Library folder".

I might point out that it is also uses Cocoa, whereas Microsoft's offering is not truly native and does not. (It's interesting to note in this context that, presumably, Office will never go 64 bit, since Office is Carbon and there's no 64-bit Carbon and Microsoft don't seem likely to re-write Office.)

Apple's offerings are excellent in themselves, standards friendly and able to talk to Darwin Calendar Server and other standards-compliant and open-source solutions; they are also able to talk better with other OS X applications (since they do use fully native technology). Added to that, Leopard has added some nice functionality such as IMAP-idle. And then there are data detectors:

http://www.apple.com...s/300.html#ical

Pretty revolutionary stuff. Nothing like that in Entourage.

It looks very much like the reviewer wants, for whatever motive, to talk Entourage up and Mail/Address Book/iCal down. But he's actually got no real arguments, nothing. Sorry, I don't buy products on the basis of people throwing metaphors at me: I'm not that naive.

[maclia]

Has anyone seen a reason why microsoft has chosen to leave Exchange support off of the 2008 Student/Teacher edition? This is different than the 2004 edition. I mainly use entourage for school, but I do work part-time at a company that uses exchange. Annoying that this is now missing--I don't see why, as a student, I should upgrade.

[bynkii]

JScott said:

I wish the article would talked more about using Entourage with Exchange. It was only mentioned in passing.

Ask and ye shall receive.

[JScott]

Well I'll be! Thank you forum faire (I mean that in a good way).

[Walt_Basil]

That's easy. Check out the license agreement for the Student Teacher edition. You can't use it for business use. That's why they offer it for only $150 or less sometimes. To keep people from buying the student edition, they pull Exchange support, which is used mainly by businesses. If a Teacher needs it for their business use, as in their business as a teacher, it's going to be provided to them by the School. MS understands not everyone has $300-400 to spend on this, so they make it available for students (mainly) at the special price. Very thoughtful of them. But in order to preserve their interest in the business users, they could pull Exchange support.

[IndyJeff]

"Microsoft has not created an e-mail application that works well with Leopard."

The fact is, Apple has not created a backup system that plays well with databases.

[bynkii]

501user said:

quote]I don't know why some reviewers insist on thinking of Apple Mail as suitable only for users with "lighter" email needs.

[/quote]
>
> Absolutely, Mail, iCal, and Address Book are all very fine applications. If a company has Exchange well and good, but otherwise ... and for individuals it's no contest. In fact, any company that hasn't got tied in to Exchange is well off: it can get hold of Leopard server and use something that's both better and cheaper as well as being standards-compatible and open.

Cheaper, no doubt. Better? Well, that's debatable. if you're an SMB, then Exchange 2007 is probably overkill. But if you're a larger company, then Mac OS X 10.5 Server is going to have issues, especially on the client end. To date, none of the CalDAV clients are particularly nice to work with beyond simplistic calendaring. Once you get past 3-4 calendars with the iCal UI paradigm, busy days get rather hard to read, unless you're constantly dis-reenabling events. For example, tuesday during Macworld in Mac OS X 10.5's iCal:

!http://homepage.mac.com/jcwelch/busydayinical.png!

The same time period in Entourage:



!http://homepage.mac.com/jcwelch/busydayinerage.png!



I don't know about you, but I know which one is easier to read for me. I admit that I may have busier calendars than most, but that wasn't the worst possible example. iCal is getting better every release, but it's not all that, not yet.





> [http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/ical.html]
>
> This reviewer seems determined to talk Apple's products down for no good reason. This statement is just laughable:
>
>

Quote

Entourage provides a wealth of features that are deeper than Apple’s trio.

>
> So I'm to reject good software solutions on the basis of a metaphor! That's simply astounding. Here "deeper" is just a metaphor, and the reviewer has given no good reason for preferring this product. I believe that's because he simply hasn't got one.
>
> Besides all that, as you point out Apple Mail has a sensible and robust storage solution. There's also no unnecessary duplication of mailstores: "it [Entourage] replicates each message ... in your User Library folder".

There isn't an "unnecessary" duplication of mail stores with E'rage either. What Tom is talking about is how Spotlight works, as would be obvious if you'd shown more of the section you're quoting. if you want to snark at Microsoft about this, then snark at Apple about iCal, because if you look in ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/iCal/, you see the same kind of thing. If you look in ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Metadata? You see duplication of the Address Book datastore entries for Spotlight. Entourage is just following Apple's lead here.

> I might point out that it is also uses Cocoa, whereas Microsoft's offering is not truly native and does not. (It's interesting to note in this context that, presumably, Office will never go 64 bit, since Office is Carbon and there's no 64-bit Carbon and Microsoft don't seem likely to re-write Office.)

That's not only incorrect, but it's ridiculous. Carbon and Cocoa are both just as "native", in fact, both use components of each other to do work. As well, your "there's no 64-bit Carbon" is not correct either. In Mac OS X 10.5, the UI components for Carbon are not 64 bit, but the underlying frameworks are. I quote from Apple's [Introduction to 64-Bit Guide for Carbon Developers:

bq. Most APIs in Mac OS X v10.5 are available to both 32-bit and 64-bit applications, but some APIs commonly used by Carbon applications are not. In particular, the APIs used to implement a Carbon user interface are generally available only to 32-bit applications. If you want to create a 64-bit application for Mac OS X, you need to use Cocoa to implement its user interface.

A quick list of what's not available to 64-bit Carbon is available at: developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/Carbon64BitGuide/PortingTo64Bit/chapter[u4[/u]section4.html#//appleref/doc/uid/TP40004381-CH3-SW14]

As well, the issue of 64-bit should be driven by need, not "Oh look, a checkbox to fill". Other than perhaps Excel, there's not much in Office that would benefit from 64-bit addressing.

Quote

Apple's offerings are excellent in themselves, standards friendly and
able to talk to Darwin Calendar Server and other standards-compliant
and open-source solutions; they are also able to talk better with other
OS X applications (since they do use fully native technology). Added to
that, Leopard has added some nice functionality such as IMAP-idle. And
then there are data detectors:
[http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#ical]

Pretty revolutionary stuff. Nothing like that in Entourage.

With the exception of CalDAV and Data Detectors, there's hardly anything "revolutionary" in Mac OS X 10.5's offerings either. E'rage supported IDLE for years before Mail did, and it still gives you better control over it. With Sync Services, you can easily sync all but email messages between Entourage and the rest of the OS. (For that matter, Mail can't truly Sync notes. It just treats them as some kind of oddball email. If that's all you need, you can do that in almost any email application.) Entourage supports open email standards, supports LDAP, supports vCard, iCal files and all the rest. Should Microsoft update Entourage 2008 to support CalDAV? Sure, and the data detectors would be handy too.

Quote

It looks very much like the reviewer wants, for whatever motive, to talk Entourage up and Mail/Address Book/iCal down. But he's actually got no real arguments, nothing. Sorry, I don't buy products on the basis of people throwing metaphors at me: I'm not that naive.

Nor should you be so naive as to fall into the OMGCOCOAMORENATIVE metaphor trap.
Message was edited by: bynkii (fixed the ugliness of the RT editor)

[bynkii]

IndyJeff said:

"Microsoft has not created an e-mail application that works well with Leopard."


The fact is, Apple has not created a backup system that plays well with databases.

That's a great point. Databases are rather painful to back up regardless of scale or manufacturer.

[maclia]

I'm not doubting what Walt_Basil is saying re: the EULA for the MAC student teacher edition and exchange support, but considering the student version for Windows is currently offered at half the price of student office for Mac AND includes exchange support (per Microsoft's website), I find it odd, and bum deal.
Student pricing: http://www.theultima...al.com/home.asp
FAQ for exchange support: http://office.micros...1650651033.aspx

[samrod]

I use Entourage on my Mac Pro and have been trying to wean myself onto Mail on my MacBook for about a week now. Unfortunately, I'm sorry, but Apple's Address Book sucks, a lot! Some issues off the top of my head:

When organizing my contacts into groups in Address Book, it's frustrating when I take the time to carefully highlight all the contacts only to lose the selection because I didn't properly click, hold, and drag. In fact, I'd say this is more of a bug rather than native behavior because I've even tried clicking and holding a while before dragging without success. It just works arbitrarily. Doesn't even matter if you try dragging the icon or the contact name. It's inconsistent.

Address Book has no color coding like Entourage's contacts, which makes it impossible to sort your contacts by category (or group). You have no way of knowing to which groups you've assigned certain contacts unless check inside the group, clearing any selection you may have had.

And that's another missing feature: sorting by any criteria other than first or last name. Contact management without the ability to sort, great!

Entourage should synch its Categories into Address Book groups. I don't need every contact I've stored in the past decade synched to my phone and would like to synch certain groups. I'd also like all my categories/groups to be carried over to Mail.

Because Address Book lacks group color coding, I'd have to create a Mail rule for every group to color code messages from its members. This is native behavior in Entourage.

Address Book doesn't display contacts in a table in which you can selectively display home, work and cell numbers, projects, categories, color coding, etc. You can only view multiple contact names at once, period. It's as though Apple created a contact manager for infants.

About Mail itself, I don't know. I'm still experience headaches with it. I tried replicating the folders and rules in Mail from Entourage. Yet for some reason, in each folder that contains subfolders, Mail creates an empty white folder. A number that supposedly indicates how may unread messages are in that folder is displayed by the folder name, yet neither it or its subfolders contain any unread messages.

In any mail folder that contains subfolders, Mail doesn't seem to allow you to store email in there. Unless I'm doing something wrong, only folders at the bottom of their hierarchy accept messages. To put it another way, in Mail, folders can only have messages or folders, not both.

I can't assign the folders colors as I can in Entourage.

Editing: the home/end keys are useless in Mail. Entourage supports the classic behavior of home/end moving the cursor to the beginning and end of the line, respectively. Instead, Mail uses command left/right arrow. No that it's a major issue, but why use modifiers if the home/end keys are available and not being used? Use both!

I agree that Entourage's single database file is risky, but I've been using it for nearly a decade now with no corruption. Worse is having to exclude it from Time Machine backups. I guess M$ didn't have enough time since WWDC to rewrite Entourage's database.

What both Entourage Contacts and Address Book lack: duplicates filtering. iSynch should recognize that the number 1234567890 is the same as 123.456.7890 and not create a new contact because my phone doesn't store the separators.

I have other issues with Mail. These are just some that stand out.

[Bookman]

Samrod,

Out of curiosity, which version of Mac OS X are you running?

[mainstreamx]

It seems that nobody here uses the excellent feature of Entourage to link everything with everything else, likewise an email with a note, or a calendar event with an email and a file. this is done in Entourage x in a very simple and easy way. This feature includes mails, notes, tasks, adresses, any file on your mac, and URls.
This feature and the better kind of address book in Entourage keeps me from switching to Apple mail and consortes.
I own now Office 2008, but I am not shure to use it.
The Time machine thing: my Entourage database is 1GB, so using timemachine on a 1 hour base, I have 12GB additional used backup space on my LaCie NAS per day, in 1 month about 300 GB.
and then there is the for me essential feature to look up addresses in Apple Adressbook in googleMaps, which lacks in Entourage