a blog on technology in the real world

Since switching to a Mac full time last spring I have tried to use native Mac apps wherever I could. I need Windows to do parts of my job, but there is a lot I can do without bringing up Parallels. It has its detractors, but Outlook 2007 on Windows has been very good to me. Granted, if we didn’t have Exchange at work, I would still be using Thunderbird, but since we do (and I have to support it), I’m glad it works so well. It’s a great improvement over Outlook 2003, and has been my primary e-mail client even after moving to the Mac.

Some people at work used the betas of Entourage 2008 and I had hope for the new version. Anything would be better than Entourage 2004. Last week I decided to use Entourage for a full week. Trying to use Entourage was an exercise in futility. I prefer to live in the “Unread” mail view with my e-mail clients, and Entourage 2008 was like 2004 in the time it took to customize it to only show incoming mail. When most people want to see unread mail, it makes sense that they wouldn’t want to see mail in the “Sent Items” or “Junk Mail” folders.

Outlook has had a great feature since at least 2003 where you can drag an e-mail over the calendar or tasks button and it will open a new calendar entry or task with the contents of the e-mail as the basis of the new entry. This comes in handy and is a time saver I’ve really gotten used to. Entourage does not have this feature. Despite the feature being around for 5 years, Microsoft didn’t include it Entourage 2008. I don’t see why they wouldn’t try and make the two products a little more similar. At least take the better features of both and integrate them to make a better product. Speaking of tasks, Entourage doesn’t pick up Tasks from Exchange either.

The deal killer for me was when I opened up Outlook yesterday and my wife called to ask why she was suddenly getting some e-mails I automatically forward to her. It was then I realized that Entourage doesn’t get the list of Outlook rules from Exchange. I have rules set up to organize my mailbox and I didn’t realize that they weren’t being filtered as they should have been.

The other Office apps are fine for my basic editing, but for any intensive work, I’m opening up Parallels and going to 2007. It’s nice being able to use the best tools from both Windows and OSX at the same time.

Tags: Windows, Mac, OSX, Office 2008, Office 2007, Entourage, Parallels, review, technology, Exchange