We Need Support for Entourage 2008

[fryguy451]

Dave,

Our problem is typically that the Exec's say "I can use this (Entourage) with Exchange, why are we getting a product with less support?" All protests to correct the false assertion of less support and attempts to overcome the fear of and resistance to change are all met with "I can now and moving to that product will break it".

Presenting areas the exec's don't currently use tend to be overwhelmingly overshadowed by areas they consider broken.

It's a hard sell when they purchase Office 2008 for MAC and then you have to tell them, "Sorry, Entourage is not supported"

[iway]

Yes, that's exactly how I see it, too. Full Entourage support is crtitcal!

[ewilen]

I just installed 10.6 on my home machine and I'm happy to report that it improves Zimbra support, most noticeably in providing seamless autocompletion for attendees in iCal. I also see hooks for CardDAV, which should be very useful once Bug 22008 - WebDAV: Add support for CardDav is finished.

In short, the argument for Entourage is correspondingly weakened as Mail/iCal improve. However I'd make the following suggestion: if Zimbra offers Entourage support, it should be part of Zimbra Professional to reflect the additional development costs associated with supporting a proprietary protocol, similar to Outlook support.

Meanwhile if CardDAV works out with Zimbra 6 and Snow Leopard, there's going to be very little need for the iSync connector--I'd think you'd only really want it for non-Intel Macs that can't use Snow Leopard. This means that many shops with Macs may be able to reduce their Pro licenses as long as they use Mail/iCal, or other standards-compliant clients. (E.g. Thunderbird/Lightning.)

One thing that Mac Office users might have to look forward to is Outlook for Mac. If this turns out to be more Outlook-like, then it might give Zimbra more options on ways to support it. (E.g., Outlook's "internet free-busy" feature is exploited by Zimbra to provide FB publishing/lookup.)

However if you're considering using Entourage in a business environment, you should be aware of the challenges it raises for effective workstation backup. Entourage stores everything in a single database, and backing that up while it's open is likely to result in a useless backup. I suppose that's okay as long as the data is also stored on the server, but information stored in local folders, including mail and addresses, is at risk. The same may apply to Outlook for Mac, too.

[gettyless]

This might not apply to your situation but I figure it might be of value to someone out there:

I deal with one pro-Entourage user who argues on grounds of productivity. Because the Entourage calendar is within the same UI as the mail, that basically minimizes the clicks and he can look at both at a glance. In this case, it was a windows user, so he had to learn the UI of a mac, along with a different mail client -- the change was too stark. I don't want to mess with his "flow" or argue about the perception/reality of productivity.

The middle ground was to install and configure Entourage. If it breaks he needs to fix it himself or use Thunderbird, which is configured also. If Thunderbird breaks we'll fix it.