Mr Chuckles dot net

I’ve been using Entourage 2004 to connect to my Exchange 2003 server at work for about a week now. Some observations…

• The Send / Receive schedule needs more flexibility. The only true way to force a sync with the Exchange server is to quit and restart the program. However, that leads me to my next complaint…
• The initial sync after startup takes forever. Once Entourage realizes it can connect to the Exchange server, it first syncs up the calendar and my contacts before moving on to my inbox. Why can’t it do my inbox first, since that’s what I really want to see ASAP?
• Nothing seems to come down with categories in tact. If I categorize contacts or calendar items in Outlook on my PC, the categories don’t show up in Entourage. This presents a problem if I want to sync certain categories of contacts to my cell phone through iSync.
• Entourage only wants to sync my primary contacts folder. I have other contacts folders below the primary one, and they don’t come down at all.
• When I reply to a message, it quotes the message in bottom-post style, but then places the cursor at the top of the quoted text. I can’t seem to make it place the cursor at the bottom.

To be fair, there are a couple of things about Entourage that are quite nice, and quite frankly I think Entourage would kick Outlook’s butt in a standalone setting. Particularly…

• The project management features are fantastic. The ability to link emails, appointments, tasks, and contacts to particular projects are really cool.
• Entourage can be easily configured to group and sort messages in many different ways, easily besting Outlook 2003’s pathetic grouping options. I can finally read my mailing lists as proper threads now.
• The overall look and feel of the program is much nicer than Outlook, and Microsoft really did a good job of making the program feel like a Mac program, far more so than any other Office 2004 application.

I hope MS doesn’t drop the product until the next release. I’d really like to see some improved Exchange sync’ing in future service packs. I think a full featured Exchange client for the Mac would really help Apple’s success in the workplace.