Diane,
This thread may be dead, but I saw how helpful you were to Zeteboy, so I
wanted to provide feedback. I found this thread - and quite a few other hits
- in searching for "entourage 2004 downgrade" because I am about to do the
same thing.
I happen to like the new interfaces of MS Office 2008* and I do like the
improvements in Entourage, such as they are. However, the killer for me is
poor, unreliable, ie unacceptable syncing. I have a Garmin device, so I'm not
shocked to find cruddy support. But my boss has a brand new, Mobile 6,
mainstream device and the support for that is unacceptable, too, so after I
have successfully transitioned back to Entourage 2004, I'll be doing the same
for her.
Apple's Sync Services may not be perfect**, but it's a whole lot more stable
than Microsoft lets on. MS appears to toss the ball back over the net rather
than take it's portion of responsibility & remedial action and provide the
required services in good working order. Syncing is a required service. I
hear a lot about lacking Exchange support, but I dare say syncing is more
universal and therefor a higher priority than even that, tho I'm sure
corporate users would take me to task over my opinion.
And to stave off responses that might suggest I try using plug-ins, I have
uses Missing Sync and have also wasted money on PocketMAC (which DESTROYED my
data and never returned my money). Missing Sync is what was working before
the UPgrade broke it.
So, until and unless message syncing works, I cannot use Entourage 2008. And
I feel compelled to provide this same feedback to all forums and articles
about Entourage 2008 that I come across. People need to be aware of what
they're (not) getting.
Thank you for the support, Diane. I am hopeful to read of a sync fix
sometime soon.
- Kevin
* Had the Mac Office UI been as munged up as the PC version, I would
absolutely not even have CONSIDERED "upgrading". That change is pretty
abysmal, IMO. The Mac Office UI changes are much more reasonable and
seemingly more purposeful than the PC changes. Your PC user testing got
skewed somehow, I fear.
** Sync Services interfaces are terrible and completely lacking. I suppose
part of the reason is the very nature of the services - that everyone is
disconnected from each other, with the services as the intermediary. But I
think that puts even more onus on Apple to provide more stringent guidelines
and even certification, if necessary, to ensure the user 1) knows what's
going on at every step and with every involved component; 2) that the user
has control over what's happening. In repeated syncs, the sync never settled
into a state of 'no change'. It's elemental that after repeated syncs with no
data changes on either side, you should expect the process to rapidly close
on a point of stasis, since nothing has changed anywhere and therefor no data
needs to sync. I wold expect this to happen after the first sync, but okay,
maybe it'll take two. After three and a message declares more than 2,000
records require conflict resolution, it's obvious it isn't working. That is
scary and unacceptable and was the final straw causing me to downgrade.
:
