Entourage newsgroups

J

John Cradock

What is the difference between microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage and
microsoft.public.office.mac.entourage?
 
W

William Smith

John said:
What is the difference between microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage and
microsoft.public.office.mac.entourage?
Click to expand...

Hi John!

This is my understanding based on multiple conversations with other MVPs
and some Microsoft folks.

The microsoft.public.office.mac.entourage newsgroup came first but is
now deprecated along with a few other groups.

In typical Microsoft fashion any product in the Microsoft newsgroups,
such as Office, is assumed to be for Windows. If referring to "Office
for Mac" then the "Mac" designation is applied. But this was not done
consistently from the beginning.

It made sense to eventually move all the disparately named Mac groups
together under microsoft.public.mac.* to unify the naming:

microsoft.public.mac.explorer
microsoft.public.mac.general
microsoft.public.mac.messenger
microsoft.public.mac.office
microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage
microsoft.public.mac.office.excel
microsoft.public.mac.office.powerpoint
microsoft.public.mac.office.word
microsoft.public.mac.otherproducts
microsoft.public.mac.rdc
microsoft.public.mac.virtualpc

rather than trying to support a variety of naming schemes that could be
for Macintosh or Windows:

microsoft.public.mac.messenger
microsoft.public.mac.office.powerpoint
microsoft.public.macintosh.general
microsoft.public.office
microsoft.public.office.mac
microsoft.public.office.mac.entourage
microsoft.public.office.excel
microsoft.public.office.excel.macintosh
microsoft.public.office.powerpoint
microsoft.public.office.word
microsoft.public.office.word.macintosh

You can probably imagine that finding a newsgroup was a little difficult
for a mac user.

Several of the MVPs have asked that the deprecated newsgroups be
removed, however, Microsoft has chosen not to do this because removing
them from their servers doesn't necessarily remove them from all of the
replicating servers in Usenet. They decided that keeping the groups
monitored (but deprecated) was better for customers rather than leaving
the groups orphaned on outdated servers with messages going unread and
unanswered.

Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>
YouTalk <http://nine.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/youtalk>
 
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