<rant>
OK, time for a brief rant on Palm Support in Entourage (I do this every
year):
Why, at this supposedly advanced stage, are we still faced with:
1. Only being able to sync one address per contact;
Because that's what the Palm OS had for 8 years. They changed it suddenly,
for their Palm OS 5, very, very late in the Office 2004 cycle - far too late
for MacBU to do anything about it. PalmOne/PalmSource never informed MacBU
they were going to introduce new features - they left them totally in the
dark. As we know, they are not going to be maintaining Mac support for any
type - not they they ever informed MacBU of anything even when they did. I
suppose one could speculate that they even did this intentionally so as not
to give MacBU a hard-start over Mark/Space Missing Sync, but I doubt it. I
imagine it just didn't occur to them. The first MacBU heard about it was
when it was Palm OS 5 was released and somebody discovered the new features
on a Tungsten. They were well into late beta-testing at that point, with
fully committed development ad testing resources, and no time. I'm sure
this is a high priority for them, and I wouldn't be surprised if they get
out a revision well before the next major Office release. But equally, I
wouldn't expect them to rush it like they did for Entourage X, where they
had to withdraw an faulty first release. And usually they'd be working on a
service release at this present stage.
2. Related to #1, no ability to have all the fields match up;
"Match up"?
3. Generally flaky syncing. If you alter an address you've previously
synced, you have a good chance of producing a duplicate instead of updating
the parallel entry in Entourage or on your Palm.
I find it does great syncing, and it's approximately 50 times faster than
with Entourage X. I notice you don't mention that. It takes me about 4
seconds to sync now.
Making a duplicate is _far, far_ better than losing data by an incorrect
merge. There's absolutely no way of knowing which field value you really
want if both have data and they're different. Syncing should choose the most
recent change, but if you've in any way altered the identifying aspect
(which could be name of the item), they would look like two different items.
It's probably the same if you've done a database rebuild. You could always
do a slow sync.
I would surely love it if a developer were to come up with a completely
function PalmOS companion program designed to work/sync with Entourage.
Either that, or some kind of XML-based database that would do the same
thing. I'm tired of settling for such a pathetic feature set. People, it's
2004 already, for crying out loud.
</rant>
Well, you're the one crying out loud. If you find the iSync works well with
Apple's Address Book and iCal, then you could use my Sync scripts to sync to
AB and iCal. It's a lot slower, but I can tell you that there are no
"match-up" inaccuracies at all. Then again, AB and iCal don't have
categories... And I find that the Entourage conduit works very well for me.
--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <
http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>
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PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.
