So does Entourage 2008 sync Exchange tasks and categories?

[Patrick Jankun]

One more thing, maybe you should consider making an voting application on this site to see what CORE functionalities are for us, and what the majority wants. I'm sure that you aren't gonna be amazed how this voting would finish. Talking about view and approach differences is not helping anyone, feel free to pull an vote online, I will be happy to see what comes out and what the other users understand under the Term of CORE functionalities in Entourage.

 

[mikedeissler]

Andy,

With all due respect, citing the things that Entgourage does now that it didn't do four years ago as some kind of achievement is like touting new shock absorber technology on a car that you've neglected to put the wheels on. Categories and tasks are the wheels of a business's organizational vehicle, wouldn't ya say?

Regards....

 

[Angry Jim]

When I purchased Office 08 I saw clearly and even purchased the license that had Exchange Support. I know I should have done more research, but when something says exchange support, it should clearly say exchange support EXCEPT for tasks!!!

This is completely crazy, the task list is a vital part of office functions in exchange environments. I had a pc sitting next to my mac for just that reason, I bought Office 08 and was ready to move the pc out of my office, until... i find out tasks don't sync. I can not tell you how angry this makes me, frustrated, and just plain pissed at M$ for just leaving us out on a limb. I mean how hard must it be to sync tasks, it can't be that much different then calendar items!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[geoff.clark]

Ted,

It would help us to know which Exchange features you¹re interested in for
Entourage so that we can prioritize them with our development.

-Andy

Lead Program Manager, Entourage
Macintosh Business Unit, Microsoft

PLEASE add Task syncing, my entire outlook / exchange productivity is
depedent upon it at work, which makes the Entourage Mac option a real
challenge
THANK YOU!!!

 

[JPElfman]

Good day
What I hoped to get was "outlook" for the Mac; it syncs OK with my Nokia 9500 communicator. Still does as I am still in the fooling around phase and use outlook on parallels desktop and windows XP.
Even more hopeless is the fact that I can use my nokia as a modem, although it cannot be used directly on the Mac. Gues it comes with being willing to go outside the office-box.

Still, Office08 seems to be stable and with my old office licenses dating back from a long time, I guess I'll have to get me a copy; will play with open source before that though

 

[cmoers]

Is there any reason why entourage 2008 can't display tasks in a Public Folder (SBS2003), while OWA with Safari does!?! Contacts and mail appear in our Public Folder but the folder with tasks looks grey and empty. I'm disappointed, 'cause it seems that there is no chance to manage tasks in public folders by a native mac-client.

Christian

 

[Bill Bryson]

Server side tasks can not accessed using Entourage 2008 or OWA. It sounds
like you can see them in OWA only. It is unknown why it has taken the
Office development team so long to address this major shortcoming. Sadly,
I've noy even heard of anyone in Microsoft definitely state that they were
even planning on doing it.

 

[J.Andersen]

Based on this discussion, it looks like we wont by the upgrade for our Macs at our office.

Andy Ruff said: "Again, please consider what we did do in 4 years..."

Well, ok.. but that's really not at good excuse for not putting sync for tasks and note in the upgrade.

Given the tense debate in here, its a fair question why some MS-folks dont just say:

"We will have this feature ready in XX days, please be patient?"

Whats the problem in giving your customers this kind of answer?

 

[Guest]

I am a new mac user, after long being a windows only person (and still am for my phone and office apps).

I think the people on this board (except the MSFT people) have it right. MSFT did not deliver a critical piece of functionality (tasks and categories) and it will have a large impact. There will be an accelerating defection from office to mac apps because of it, there is not question.

The MSFT guys can give there defensive excuses about stablity, etc. But at the end of the day, failing to deliver will costs MSFT money in term of office license, and increase the loss of mobile phone OS to the iPhone. Once you dump office, you dump wm6.

If the MSFT guys were at all serious, and wanted to respond to the (loyal customers) on this board, there answer would read something like this:

"we here you, we tried to get categories and task sync into the release but simple could not given the core work we did to the app. we know you are disappointed, we knew you needed this, and we are sorry. that said, it is a top priority and the current plan is that have it within the next year (or whatever"

That would at least directly answer what we want to know. And if it were true, they would say it. But it's not. I guessed they simply missed it, which is hard to fathom.

 

[Bryan Lee]

I think the big issue here is parity with Outlook. I am head of Mac support at a major University and regularly hear the recommendations that users use Windows running in Parallels simply because features are 'missing' in Entourage. I understand that Outlook Express for Mac disappeared a decade ago, but when new major features (or existing features from Outlook 2003) are absent from a brand new release, it is self-defeating.

I spent the summer holding Entourage 2004 training classes and regularly preached to the class that 'surely 2008 will have the missing features that you are seeing in Outlook 2007' only to have pie in my face later.

I was glad to see some missing features show in the Beta (Auto-reply for instance), but somewhat disappointed in finding out that the Tasks didn't sync (major missing piece) and categories not syncing. The categories presents major issues when an executive is on one platfrom (WinXP) and the admin assist. is on a Mac. Sad that both users are dealing with Microsoft products and a Microsoft Exchange server in the middle, but the pieces don't play well together. Can't blame another vendor for that problem.

Hopefully, this will be remedied in an update soon.

 

[Jackson Ferry]

Bahh, this sucks. I NEED integration with Tasks. I don't suppose Microsoft will give me a refund once I've opened the software? :-(

 

[Jesse David Hollington]

Yes, this is probably in first place on my "I can't believe they didn't add
this to 2008" list.... I *really* expected this to be there for Entourage
2008, since it seems like such a shocking omission.

In fact, the lack of this makes Entourage almost unusable for Blackberry
users, since there's no effective way to get Notes and Tasks between the
Blackberry and the desktop other than using either a cabled sync (which is
so 90's), or Parallels/VMWare with an actual Outlook client.

 

[William Smith]

Bahh, this sucks. I NEED integration with Tasks. I don't suppose
Microsoft will give me a refund once I've opened the software? :-(

Yes, Microsoft will give you a refund if you find the software does not
meet your needs or expectations.

<http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/productrefund/refund.mspx>

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/>

 

[Frederick_N]

bill

It possibly helps. I can understand your team's thinking, but I hope you can understand that many users, are really really wanting to keep the same task list, categories, and notes on different computers. It is hard to accept that this is so very very difficult when we know that we can sync a pda to a one of the computers. For that matter, the tasks quite easily sync to ical (unfortunately they seem to lose their category setting).

What makes it doubly difficult is that there seems to be NO way to access these items without keyboarding them. So far I see no way to export or import these items and no way to access them in Automator. Over in VisualBasic land I can get at the items, pass them to another program, or even convert them to text files.

I cannot really leave the windows version behind, because I keep my Outlook in sync with yet another program which operates from a SQL database. So, yeah maybe I will send it back and run Outlook on a VM or just hook to the desktop over PCAnywhere.

fred

 

[Jon Murphy]

I just bought my new 16GB iPhone and am in process of copying all my old Palm Treo Windows contacts off of it.

Bye, bye, MSFT, you've lost.

 

[William Smith]

bill

It possibly helps. I can understand your team's thinking, but I hope
you can understand that many users, are really really wanting to keep
the same task list, categories, and notes on different computers. It
is hard to accept that this is so very very difficult when we know
that we can sync a pda to a one of the computers. For that matter,
the tasks quite easily sync to ical (unfortunately they seem to lose
their category setting).

What makes it doubly difficult is that there seems to be NO way to
access these items without keyboarding them. So far I see no way to
export or import these items and no way to access them in Automator.
Over in VisualBasic land I can get at the items, pass them to another
program, or even convert them to text files.

I cannot really leave the windows version behind, because I keep my
Outlook in sync with yet another program which operates from a SQL
database. So, yeah maybe I will send it back and run Outlook on a VM
or just hook to the desktop over PCAnywhere.

Hi Fred!

For the record, I'm not part of Microsoft. I'm just a volunteer in this
newsgroup. But I can tell you that Microsoft is hearing the complaints
about Tasks/Notes synchronization with Exchange.

If you haven't already, be sure to directly let Microsoft know your
needs by using the Help --> Send Feedback mechanism in any Office
application or visit their website.

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>

 

[Paul_Barnard]

On 2/7/08 6:12 PM, in article (e-mail address removed)9absDaxw,

:

&gt; Is there a solution to SYNC, Calender, Categories, Colours, Tasks, Email, etc
&gt; from my MAC running Leopard 10.5.1 to a MS Mobile Windows 6.0.?

It's a Leopard bug:

When syncing calendars on Leopard using any sync software it's possible for
the iCal sync program ("iCalExternalSync") to get confused and stop syncing.

The primary symptom of this bug is that updated events stop appearing in
iCal, but continue to show up in other synchronized devices and
applications.

For example, if you use Spanning Sync to sync Google Calendar with iCal and
also use iTunes to sync iCal with your iPhone, events from Google Calendar
will sync to your iPhone but not to iCal. The bug is fairly rare but can
affect any user at any time. And when it does strike, it continues to
happen, making it appear that nothing is syncing to iCal at all.

This bug is more likely to happen when you've enabled the "Show Birthdays
calendar" option in your iCal preferences. If you are affected by this bug,
you may be able to solve the problem simply by disabling this option in
iCal. Note that once you do so, you'll still need to "reset info on this
computer" in the Spanning Sync pref pane in order to force events to
re-sync.

Another fix (although potentially only temporary), is to reset Apple Sync
Services:
� Open iSync (in /Applications)
� Select Preferences from the iSync menu
� Click "Reset Sync History..."
� Wait for the reset to finish
� Try syncing again

Diane,

I'm not convinced that is the full story. I have the configuration you describe. iPhone, iCal, Address Book, Spanning Sync to multiple Google Calendars and Entourage 2004 and have all this Synced to a second Mac using .Mac. I have absolutely no syncing issues with this configuration. If I install Entourage 2008 the whole sync services screws up. I get duplicated contacts, duplicated or missing events and/or no syncing in iCal. Removing Entourage 2008 and changing absolutely nothing else results in everything coming back to life (after resetting Sync Services) Reinstalling Entourage 2004 and still all is well. I retried Entourage 2008 again and yet again the whole system fell apart.

It may be a Leopard bug but the trigger is Entourage 2008 on my system. Right now 2008 is removed from my system and I using Entourage 2004.

What a wast of effort...

 

[DMY]

Half a decade ago, Entourage did not even talk to Exchange. We have been consistently and regularly adding Exchange functionality to Entourage, many of them in regular, free updates. 2008 brought a number of new features:

Out of Office
Kerberos Single Sign-on
Free/Busy Detailing
To Do flag sync
Delegation over HTTP


We realize there are shortcomings and some of them are painful. However, we want to make sure we build a reliable product. Not just check features. We stepped back from features and took the time to improve the app's quality and reliability. Without doing so, it would have been much harder to deliver more Exchange functionality in the future as we plan to do. You will find Entourage 2008 much more reliable when using existing Exchange functionality such as calendaring and mailbox synchronization.

-Andy

Sorry Andy, a typical response of a product manager who's not listening to the needs of their users. Yes, all important features, and yes, all important stability issues. Flagging is all well and good (and by the way, a sore point for me is that it's missing in Windows Mobile, but I digress).

It seems to me that this forum and thread is very much informing you of a key feature missing in your product (I stress the term *YOUR* here, you largely own the direction). The features you mention above are needed too... but as a development director myself, and one who has been a program and product manager as well, comparable product parity is vital to happy customers. My personal choice would have been to continue on parity (e.g. Tasks) before I'd have spent time on new features like "My Day". After all, isn't My Day just a better version of "Outlook Today"???

Suggest you prioritize this quickly and communicate succinctly to your customer base.

D.

 

[carlivar]

Yes Andy, your candid feedback is appreciated but frankly the features rolled out between Entourage 2004 and 2008 are almost a joke.

Let me be clear: we want basic features. If it's a big ol' button in Outlook we want it. Tasks is quite a large button.

I find it odd that you are essentially saying that you'll worry about details later, then publishing a list of details that you rolled out. Out of Office notifications? Not a big deal, sorry. That already took about 5 seconds to change in OWA.

I don't want to be too negative so I will say that the calendar improvements are much-appreciated. I can finally change my invite status directly from the calendar, and the whole calendar in general feels more reliable to me.

But c'mon... I still have to log into a terminal server to change server-side rules (no, I don't want client-side rules). I know this is "tricky" since Exchange doesn't make it easy to change. But you need to go over to the Exchange guy's cube and pester him every day about this. It's absolutely ridiculous. To me if this stuff is "tricky" then Exchange is fundamentally broken, or Microsoft internal communication around product requirements is fundamentally broken.

 

[Captain]

I'm going to get in line here and voice my disappointment as well. And I wasn't even disappointed until today. We're looking at Project Management solutions and wouldn't you know it... most of them (that I've found) rely on Exchange tasks and categories... since we're a video production department nearly all of us work on Macs... and we're not going to sign into Citrix every time we want to check our project management.