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Just a quick post to explain the silence from this blog. In late August I moved from the Entourage team to the Hotmail Front Door Program Management team. I really should have prepared this post before I made the move, but I was nusy wrapping up loose ends before I left, and since then I've been even busier learning about Hotmail. I probably won't be posting much here for a while as I don't yet feel quite the same confidence about talking publicly about Hotmail as I did about Entourage (but feel free to ask me questions), and I’m no longer really in the loop about all things Entourage (but Dennis is). If I get a few free moments, I will get around to a follow-up to "A Brief History of Microsoft's mail and Exchange clients on the Mac: Part I". Until then, if you are interested you can revisit some of Omar's older posts that will bring you closer to the present: Entourage: A journey to becoming an Office application and Entourage 2004.
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Most folks in the MacBU have an iPod of one sort of another. In the last month or two I've gotten into countless discussions (well, OK, not countless, but more than one) with otherwise intelligent coworkers about the dangers of driving with headphones. They tend to make arguments about headphones being no more distracting than the car's sound system, or they go down the smart aleck “should we stop the deaf from driving?” path. I'm tired of this whole topic, but would like to point out some things: - It is illegal to drive with headphones in California, and apparently in most other states as well:
- 27400. ( )1 A person operating a motor vehicle or bicycle may not wear a headset covering, or earplugs in, both ears
- Deaf folks may in fact have worse driving records
- Yes, I realize that not every law makes sense, and that no one obeys the speed limit, but this particular law makes lots of sense
- Yes, I agree that people talking on their cell phones, reading the paper, applying makeup, shaving, or eating are also a danger, but that has nothing to do with this issue.
- So please, go out and spend the few measly dollars on an adapter for your car. If you are as stingy as me, you can get a tape adapter for around a buck on e-bay. Or if you are really pig headed, at least pull one of the earplugs out. And spare me the sob story about the horrific sound degradation you will have to suffer. After all, your car isn’t a concert hall.
- Interestingly, you can rat on unsafe California drivers if you want the DMV to reevaluate their ability to drive safely, but efore you get too excited about drowning your foes in complaints, you can't do it anonymously unless they are in your immediate family. On a closing tangent, I'd be interested to see the statistics about how many of these requests the DMV gets, and how they breakdown. While we are off on a tangent, I'd also like to know more about the smarmily-named 764-HERO program in Washington State which encourages folks to call in and snitch when they see carpool lane violations. On the one hand, I never cheat in the carpool lane, and my road rage boils away when I see people do it, but on the other hand I find the idea of encouraging citizens to snitch on each other deeply distasteful. There are some interesting stats from a few years ago at the official site linked above and in this newspaper article, which also explains that a call won’t result in anyone getting a ticket, but they don't tell you much about the effectiveness of the program. Oh well, one more thing to add to the "Look into when I've caught up on absolutely everything else, including but not limited to cleaning the garage, learning to play a musical instrument, reading all the books on my booklist, working through the netflix queue and catching up on sleep" file.
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Let's say you accidentally drag a message in Outlook from its folder to the top level of your mailbox. You know, that folder that is called "Mailbox - John Doe", which seems to momentarily hang Outlook when you click on it but is really just preparing the "Outlook Today" view. Where did your message just go? Do you know how to get to it? We already know that you can't just click on the mailbox folder because it will bring up the "Outlook Today" view, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to turn off the "Outlook Today" view. (Update: As most of the comments point out, it is easy to turn off the Outlook Today view in Outlook 2003, by opening to the home page tab of the properties page for Outlook Today and unchecking "Show home page by default for this folder." I don't have older versions of outlook sitting around but it might work there too. So you can skip the rest of the post now...) Has the message been deleted? If you right-click on the mailbox, get its properties and click the 'folder size' button you will notice that the size of the folder without subfolders is greater than zero, and if you accidentally drop another message into the mailbox you will notice the size increases, so you know that the message isn't gone. Phew. Even if you don't think you've ever been as clumsy as me, you should take a look at the folder size. If it isn't zero then you also have some messages up there. If it is zero then you are more coordinated than me, and if you want to follow the rest of this entry you can reproduce the original accident using a copy of a message from your deleted items or junk mail folder. Those of us with access to a Mac can now jump over to Entourage and see if we can get to the lost message. Unfortunately we don't get to gloat this time as Entourage can't see the message, and it doesn't matter if you set up the account as an IMAP account or as an Exchange account. How about OWA? You fire it up, and take a peek at the URL used when opening a folder in a new window which looks something like: http://myserver/exchange/gil/Inbox/mycoolfolder/?Cmd=contents. So you try stripping out the /Inbox/mycoolfolder, but that doesn't get return any results. A little more playing and you find it makes no difference if you connect to front end or back end, Premium OWA or Basic OWA. Don't bother trying an IMAP account in Windows Outlook Express, it doesn't help. OK, back to Outlook. If you know anything about the lost message, you can do an advanced find for it, making sure to search from the top folder. This will find the message. (You can also do an advanced find for all messages, but that might take a while and you might have a hard time picking out the lost message from all the results.) In the search results take a look at the 'In Folder' column for the message (if it isn't shown, then you need to right click on the column header, select Field Chooser, and add the column). It will say either 'IPM_SUBTREE' or 'Top of Information Store' depending on which versions of Outlook and Exchange you are running. Armed with this information we can now create a search that will return only the messages we need. Go to the advanced tab of the search criteria and enter a criteria for 'In Folder' contains IPM_SUBTREE. Cool, we've found the message, but now how do we keep this search around so that we don't have to jump through these hoops every time this happens? In older versions of Outlook you are stuck saving out the search as file (it will have an .oss extension). That isn't so helpful because files have a way of getting lost and never being around when you need them. To get around this, you can drag the .oss file into Outlook. I used to keep it around in my drafts folder (my misuse of the drafts folder could serve as fodder for a whole new series of posts about the wrong ways to manage notes and how OneNote saved me. If you are running the latest Outlook/Exchange you can save the search to your Saved Searches, which is very convenient and is yet another good reason to upgrade. I've always assumed that there is an easier way to find these messages, but I've never found it, and with the addition of saved searches my workaround is good enough for me. To answer the question that I'm positive is not topmost on anyone's mind: IPM stands for InterPersonal Message. Random things I should look into some day unless someone kindly answers in a comment: what archive settings does the IPM_SUBTREE location have?
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I often get asked what the story is with Microsoft's various Mail clients for the Mac. It will take a few posts to give a full historical overview that will fill in the major details and might answer some of the questions. This first post discusses the various versions of the Exchange client and Mac Outlook. A future post will talk about Mac Internet Mail and News (IMN), Mac Outlook Express (OE) and Entourage. I'm going to skip talking about VirtualPC, Remote Desktop Client and Outlook Web Access, all of which are excellent options for getting Exchange connectivity on a Mac, but aren't really Exchange or Mail clients. The older information has been reconstructed from various sources and happened a long time ago (before I was at Microsoft) and in a galaxy far far away (as in: they weren't produced in the MacIPU or the MacBU) so I can't really vouch for the accuracy of the older information, but I figure it is worth a post, and I'll be glad to update it with any other information. Way back in the early 1990s, before Exchange and Outlook and Outlook Express, there was a product called Microsoft Mail for Mac or MSMail for Mac or Mail for AppleTalk Networks (or something like that), and also a Schedule+ for the Mac. It was a workgroup post-office client, and I don't really know much more about it. It seems Microsoft bought it or its precursors along with the precursors of Exchange back in 1991 from Consumers Software, a Canadian company based in Vancouver, for something like $20 million. The original application was called "Network Courier e-mail". Microsoft later sold it to StarNine (which was bought by quarterdeck which was bought by 4D). You can follow some ancient links to find out more if you are really interested: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;148946, http://www.computerbooksonline.com/train/chpter1.htm, http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-050.html The first version of Exchange (4.0) shipped in 1996, and included a beta release of a 68K Mac client. A Full Mac client with PPC support shipped a little later in 1996. This client wasn't localized to any languages beyond English, and supported only mail. It had no PIM functionality, and didn't support MAPI forms. The code name for the Windows and Mac client was "Capone". Exchange 5.0 shipped early in 1997 and included an updated Mac client that added support for schedule+ calendars by integrating a schedule+ application into the client. (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=/support/exchange/content/whitepapers/mac5.asp#Schedule) Windows Outlook 97 (the first version of Outlook) shipped in early 1997. Mac Outlook 8.0 shipped in November 1997 and added support for forms through OWA. It was a PPC-only release and was partially based on code ported from Windows Outlook. Exchange 5.5 shipped in early 1998. Outlook 8.01 shipped in mid 1998. It added 68k support back, and fixed problems with the new Mac OS 8. Mac Outlook 8.1 shipped in November 1998 and included s/mime support, but still didn't work well with the Win Outlook calendar which had diverged from Schedule+. Mac Outlook 8.2 shipped in mid-1999. It was an attempt to fix customer dissatisfaction by showing Microsoft commitment to Mac in an interim release while work continued on a more complete release. It still didn't include cross platform calendaring, but did include other smaller fixes and updates. There are few more minor release in the 8.2 line, but I don't know much about them: 8.2.1 in summer of 1999, and 8.2.2 in May of 2000. After a lengthy public beta, Mac Outlook 2001 (code name: Watson) released in June 2001. It featured full cross platform calendaring and a much improved UI. It is fine little PIM and still runs happily on my Mac in classic mode. The first real OS X releases were around the corner and the decision was made not to try to keep bringing the Mac Outlook code forward, so the Mac Outlook team was disbanded. You can glean some of this history from the Lifecycle pages on the Microsoft support pages: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=lifecycle In the next post in this series I'll relate the story of how Mac Internet Mail and News became Mac Outlook Express and then became Mac Entourage, and how Entourage is the future.
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On the way to work this morning, sometime just before 7 AM, I was half-listening to one of the local San Francisco Bay Area public radio stations, either KALW or KQED. I was deep in thought about something, so I had mostly tuned out the radio, but at a certain point I became aware that I was humming along to the intro of the song Tainted Love by Soft Cell. The music faded out just before the lyrics start, and then the announcer says that Microsoft is a proud sponsor of public radio, followed by our latest marketing catchphrase. Coincidence? Or is someone trying to associate Microsoft with this "uniquely sleazy" flashback to the early 80s? And if so, whose idea was it? Microsoft's or the station's? Aside from getting the song firmly stuck in a repeat loop in my mind, what purpose did this serve?
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If you are using Entourage 2004 to connect to Exchange 2000 and notice that some mail folders show up in other Exchange clients (OWA or Outlook), but aren't showing up in Entourage, then your Exchange server may need this recently released Exchange 2000 hotfix. After applying the hotfix, you should follow these steps to get the folders back in Entourage (this text is copied from the end of section 5.2 of the Entourage 2004 readme):
If Exchange account mail folders are visible in Outlook but not in Entourage, make sure you have installed the latest update to Exchange. To access Exchange account folders within Entourage, use Outlook or Outlook Web Access (OWA) to rename the folder and then rename it again to its original name. The folder will then be visible within Entourage.
Here's some more info about the hotfix from the KB article:
SYMPTOMSWhen you connect to your Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server account by using Microsoft Entourage 2003 for Mac, some Exchange folders are missing. These Exchange folders are visible when you use the Microsoft Windows version of Microsoft Outlook or when you use Microsoft Outlook Web Access to view the folders.
RESOLUTION
Hotfix informationA supported hotfix is now available from Microsoft, but it is only intended to correct the problem that is described in this article. Only apply it to systems that are experiencing this specific problem. This hotfix may receive additional testing. Therefore, if you are not severely affected by this problem, we recommend that you wait for the next Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server service pack that contains this hotfix. To resolve this problem immediately, contact Microsoft Product Support Services to obtain the hotfix. For a complete list of Microsoft Product Support Services phone numbers and information about support costs, visit the following Microsoft Web site:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;[LN];CNTACTMS Note In special cases, charges that are ordinarily incurred for support calls may be canceled if a Microsoft Support Professional determines that a specific update will resolve your problem. The usual support costs will apply to additional support questions and issues that do not qualify for the specific update in question.
Note Because of file dependencies, this hotfix requires Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack 3. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
301378 How to obtain the latest Exchange 2000 Server service pack
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I got this feature request for Entourage the other day:
Allow viewing a monthly calendar from a given week through the next 4 weeks - not forcing us to view the whole month of July when it is July 20th - instead seeing two weeks in July, and 2 weeks in August
This is actually something you can already do in Entourage 2004. Here's how:
The key first step is to expand the mini calendar picker. By default it only shows one month:
You can expand it by dragging the top or right hand border, thus getting the mini calendar picker to show more than one month. Now you can drag select the 5 week period you want to view:
Voilà, half of September and half of October:
Now, if you want to get really silly you can expand the mini calendar to mammoth proportions and view more than a year's worth of mini calendars. Not sure why you'd want to do this though:
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