I gave Entourage 2008 a go for a few weeks, but have since switched back to Thunderbird. It was really a lot of little things that just kept adding up.

Here are the top 5 reasons why I dropped Entourage 2008.

1. No Hyperlink Support - You can’t link a few words in emails. This was one that really gets me. I’m always linking phrases to tutorials or additional resources so that people know what I’m talking about.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: This function is not available.

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.

Since I’ve made the switch from Thunderbird to Entourage 2008, one of my missing features is the ability to sync with Google calendar.

I tried using Plaxo, but they sync to your main Google calendar and not any others. This may work well if you only have one Google calendar to sync with, but that wasn’t my case.

I thought about some of the tools like Spanning Sync and gSync but Spanning says it doesn’t work right with Entourage and gSync doesn’t say anything. You’d think that since Entourage syncs with iCal, that it wouldn’t be that hard.

I’ve been a big fan of Thunderbird for a while now, but I’m moving on. Entourage 2008 is calling my name at work and I’m listening. I’m a bit sad to say goodbye to Thunderbird, but yet excited at the same time. So why the switch?