We’ll I’ve been on Entourage 2008 for about three weeks now and the ride has had its ups and downs. I’m happy with Entourage for the most part, but it’s flaws are hard to ignore.

Things I love:

• Projects - Projects are cool in the fact that I can group emails together, file them away, yet have easy access to them. I need to dig into this more and use it.
• Full Calendar Support - No more Outlook meeting request issues or confusion. This was a big factor in changing to Entourage at work.
• Notes & Checklist built in. Handy.
• Mac look and feel. I do think it looks pretty.
• Little Growl like email and calendar notifications.
• The day planner window is nice. Kind of in the way, but you get use to it.
• It auto corrects some of my spelling mistakes. That’s quite handy.
• It saves folders as mbox files which makes easy import/export with Mail.app or Thunderbird. Moving everything over was slick. Moving back would be just as easy.
• It links emails replies to the orgional message so I don’t have to go search for them if I want to know what I said.

Things that make me go What the @+#!

• No ability to add clickable links on text to an email message. You can’t highlight any text and and a link to it. You can only drop in a URL and let the other email client automatically link it. This is really bugging me. See the heated discussion.
• When I get links in emails Entourage often picks up the next word in the sentence so I have to manually edit quite a few links I click on.
  Example: http://www.apple.comApple
• Calendar syncing to iCal works great, but Entourage’s calendar files contain information that iCal or Google Calendar doesn’t understand. They then cause issues if trying to export from iCal and import into anything else. Or, I get sync issues and end up loosing half my dates. If there are event sync issues, never fix all of them at once. Do it one by one.
• Syncing up with Google is another issue in itself.
• No way to delete people from the ‘collected address’. Entourage adds everyone you ever emailed, or got email from, to some ‘collected address’ address book and doesn’t allow you to delete them.
• If I have text selected when I hit reply, it only puts that selected text as the quoted message. Personally, I want the entire message every time. At least Apple Mail has a checkbox where I can enable that functionality.
• No grammar check. I really thought I’d have this as I thought Entourage an Word were like BFFs.
• When importing email, it auto accepted all my old meeting requests and then notified me. Not a huge deal I guess, but annoying none the less.

Overall, Entourage 2008 isn’t horrible, but it isn’t fantastic. It’s not Outlook for the Mac, but it’s closer than anything else. For every positive there is a flaw and if there were any other solution that worked flawlessly with Outlook calendar notifications, I’d consider switching away. Ok, I’ll admit, 10.5’s Mail.app is pretty good, but I don’t have 10.5 at work.

Background. This is my first experience with Entourage. I recently used Apple Mail and then Thunderbird 2. My computer is a MacBook Pro with 10.4.x on it.

Tags: email, mac, Microsoft, office, outlook