Thanks for the chance to climb onto a soap box and spout off!
(I should mention that the following is simply my personal opinion,
not that of Google, and that all the trademarks in it are the property
of their respective owners, I am not an emplyee of Microsoft, I am not
a doctor, I just play one on TV, etc, etc, ad nauseam.)
I made the upgrade from Outlook Express to Entourage about a year and
a half ago and then made the jump from Office 2001 to Office X a few
months ago. Overall, I've been very impressed. The overall integration
of Entourage into the Office suite is...sweet.
Let's start with the good stuff -
The Entourage interface is almost identical to the Outlook Express
interface you know so the learning curve is flat. The options,
settings, rules, account settings and so on are even imported into
Entourage when you upgrade.
One of the main reasons for me to upgrade the need for a group
personal information manager for a small virtual work group. Instead
of going with a dedicated PIM system we decided to try Entourage and
had good results. We found that being able to send invitations to
events from one Calendar user to another made Entourage a viable group
scheduler. We simply sent each other invitations to every event we
added to our calendars, and everybody knew everybody else's
availability.
Entourage works fabulously well with MS Office, and if you're a Word
user, it is worth getting just for the convenience of the Address
Book. As you're typing a name, Word will pop-up names from your
address book as suggestions. When the name you were typing appear,
select it and it is inserted. Envelopes are dead easy with this
system.
Entourage's spam filter is fantastic. I've got my spam filter set to
the highest level, and find that it rarely misses anything in either
direction (i.e it rarely marks spam as good stuff nor does it classify
good stuff as spam.)
Since you mentioned wanting to be able to customize Entourage, you'll
be quite happy with the rules features. You can set any number of
criteria for a rule, and daisy chain as many actions to each rule as
you want. In my case, incoming messages that survive the spam filter
are sorted into folders and sub folders according to who sent them and
what they're about. I've also got various levels of alerts depending
on those same criteria, so I get told about stuff I consider urgent in
a quite dramatic way, and less pressing stuff is less obtrusive when
it arrives. Entourage has an impressive AppleScripting dictionary, and
one of the rule actions is "Execute AppleScript" opening an entire
universe of possibilities.
If you're running MacOS X, you'll need the Office X version since
there are some ciritcal roblems with Office 2001 running in Classic
mode (I could never get it to print.) The OS X version is so much
faster than the old one that it is a dream to use. Also, in months of
use (Entourage launches whenever my Mac is on) I've never seen it
crash.
Fast, stable, useful....what more could we want?
Well, there is always something.
Here's the bad stuff -
As with Outlook Express, you can't view your messages in threaded view
by any sort order other than by thread name.
The Calendar's invitation capability is missing from the To-Do list
manager, and there is no provision for sharing Address Book
information. Our work around for the To-Do list issue was to simply
ignore it, and use the Calendar for managing To-Do's, too.
Our work around for the Address Book problem was to occasionally
export all of our contacts, have one of us merge them all, rip out
the duplicates (we eventually built an AppleScript to do that,)
re-export them, re-distributed them, and re-import them. The process
was actually much faster and easier than it looks.
There's no easy way to use the Calendar for invoicing. As a time based
consultancy, we found that a real problem and would have appreciated a
way to easy copy Calendar events into Excel for billing. There is an
AppleScript to export the Calendar as HTML, but that wasn't what we
needed.
Overall, whenever I have the chance, I run down and slander Microsoft,
but in the case of Entourage, I'm force to admit they've done a great
job and that it is well worth the money. Even if you dont' need all of
the parts of Office, Entourage is so good, you'll not be disappointed.
Oh - as to upgrading from Entourage to Windows Outlook - there is no
mention of that on their site, but in my experience they're actually
pretty flexible on any kind of competitive upgrade or cross-grade
policies that have come up.
I hope this has been helpful. I'd be happy to provide more information
if you'd like. (Once I get started, I hate to shut up)
Thanks for asking!
daveslipp_ga |
