Syncing the replied/forwarded status of an Entourage message with Exchange

[erzeszut]

Like all mail programs, Entourage shows small arrow icons in the Inbox
message list to indicate that a message has been replied to or
forwarded --
blue for replied, green for forwarded.

The "InfoBar" at the top of the message will also read "You replied to
this
message on..."

The Entourage reply/forward indicators do not sync with the server. If
a
user (such as my boss) uses multiple computers with Entourage, each
Entourage client has its own set of reply/forward indicators, and
tracks the
status of messages independently.

These reflect only the actions taken on a particular message from a
particular computer. So if a user replies to a message from Entourage
using
her Mac at home, her office Mac will not show the "replied" icon.

This is different from the way the PC version of Outlook interacts with
the
Central Exchange server. In Outlook, the replied/forwarded icons
appear on
the same messages in both the Outlook client and when using Outlook Web
Access. And if a user has multiple computers running Outlook, the
replied/forwarded indicators appear correctly on all clients.

Obviously, the Outlook behavior is much more desirable. Does anyone
know of
a way to get Entourage to mimic this behavior, and sync the
replied/forwarded status with the Exchange server, instead of tracking
this
status locally??

If someone knows that this definitively CANNOT be done, I would
appreciate
documentation of that as well.

Thanks.
Eric

 

[Barry Wainwright [MVP]]

Sorry, but it can't be done. Two entirely different methods are used for the
two systems tracking information.

Outlook/exchange does this through a protocol called MAPI, and the
information is stored on the server. That is why it is available from
multiple log on points.

Entourage's tracking pre-dates exchange functionality within entourage, and
is managed locally. Since entourage (2004) connects through WebDav, there is
no common protocol to transfer this data to the server.

I don't know that this precise topic is documented anywhere by Microsoft
(they don't often document missing features, after all).

 

[EJR]

Thanks Barry. This is what I figured, since I couldn't find any
documentation of it. But I thought I'd ask around anyway.