Spotlight, synch services, and Entourage-- coming in March

T

TR

During the Stevenote yesterday, Roz Ho took the stage and, unless I
misunderstood her, announced that Entourage would play nice with
Spotlight after a free update in March. She also mentioned sync
services.

This is great news. Anyone hear anything else about the update? For
example, syncing with Entourage (and Palm) has always wiped out the
location field on the Palm for events for me. Should I be optimistic
about that being fixed in the March release?

TR
 
D

Dan Gaters

TR:
Entourage would play nice with Spotlight
Click to expand...

Does that mean that you'd be happy if Entourage pretty much *duplicated*
your database so that metadata files were made accessible to Spotlight?

Dan
 
C

Chris Ridd

During the Stevenote yesterday, Roz Ho took the stage and, unless I
misunderstood her, announced that Entourage would play nice with
Spotlight after a free update in March. She also mentioned sync
services.

This is great news. Anyone hear anything else about the update? For
example, syncing with Entourage (and Palm) has always wiped out the
location field on the Palm for events for me. Should I be optimistic
about that being fixed in the March release?
Click to expand...

AIUI the brave new Sync Services world requires that your app syncs against
an internal (to Sync Services) database, and your Palm (via Missing Sync)
also syncs against that internal database.

In other words Entourage will no longer have a Palm conduit per se, and will
thus not care what database fields your Palm supports.

This could be very interesting :)

Cheers,

Chris
 
C

Chris Ridd

TR:


Does that mean that you'd be happy if Entourage pretty much *duplicated*
your database so that metadata files were made accessible to Spotlight?
Click to expand...

Aren't you making some assumptions here? What if MS decides to ditch the
idea of having a single monolithic Database file in favour of lots of
(indexable) smaller files?

Cheers,

Chris
 
D

Dan Gaters

Chris Ridd:
Aren't you making some assumptions here?
Click to expand...

I always do. :)
What if MS decides to ditch the idea of having a single monolithic Database
file in favour of lots of (indexable) smaller files?
Click to expand...

Then, I'd be eating crow.
But I'm not hungry.

Why, do you want to wager that they won't?

Dan
 
C

Chris Ridd

Chris Ridd:


I always do. :)


Then, I'd be eating crow.
But I'm not hungry.

Why, do you want to wager that they won't?
Click to expand...

Well, not a /whole/ lot, LOL. But duplicating disk writes wouldn't make
Entourage run any more quickly, and since it is already somewhat lethargic I
doubt they'd go this route. There's also the obvious disk space issue - I
compacted my DB recently and it is down to about 3GB :-(

I suppose we'll find out in a month or so...

Cheers,

Chris
 
J

Jeff Zienowicz

Well, not a /whole/ lot, LOL. But duplicating disk writes wouldn't make
Entourage run any more quickly, and since it is already somewhat lethargic I
doubt they'd go this route. There's also the obvious disk space issue - I
compacted my DB recently and it is down to about 3GB :-(

I suppose we'll find out in a month or so...

Cheers,

Chris
Click to expand...
That's a good point about performance. According to a Microsoft rep I spoke
with at Macworld Expo today, they will in fact be adding a folder of
metadata files which will live outside the database for Spotlight searches.
While I look forward to Spotlight's seeing Entourage data, I do hope that it
doesn't make the app even slower. Incidentally, the internal Entourage Find
functions will remain the same, I'm told -- no Spotlight searching from
within Entourage itself (fine by me).

The interface to Sync Services will be nice, as Entourage will of course
sync with other Sync Services clients, including Apple Address Book and
iCal. However, as Sync Services doesn't support categories, all Entourage
calendar entries will appear in a single iCal calendar called "Entourage."

Jeff
 
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