Mac Mojo : Entourage

It's About Data

rkmiec — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:45:00 GMT

In my Calendar post, I touched on some of the work we’ve done in our Entourage 2008 reliability focus. I’d like to continue that discussion today with some details about our efforts in another critical area, the Entourage Database. Apart from a few exceptions (e.g. Rules definitions, signatures), essentially all Entourage user data is stored in the database. Reliability and trustworthiness here are our top priority. In Entourage 2008, we dedicated a large amount of time to identifying database areas with potential for new approaches and improvements. We found new ways to better detect database inconsistencies. We’ve also implemented tighter controls on data type enforcement and are smarter about reclaiming storage from deleted items. The end result is more confidence in the integrity of your data.

For those instances when inconsistencies are detected, the Entourage 2008 database recovery tool will be a more effective solution. In past versions, recovering your database was intrusive and required additional work to get things back into shape. Metadata like Categories, Project designations, and Links were lost. Mail filtering rules were also often victims when the clearing of IMAP and Exchange caches would break links between Rules and their related folders. In Entourage 2008, these are all preserved. Categories, Projects, Links, and Rules are no longer vulnerable to the process. The recovery is now more precisely focused on correcting only problem areas.

Compatibility with Apple’s Time Machine backup feature in Leopard is a database area that has received a lot of attention recently. Because Entourage uses a single file database, over time it can become large (sometimes really large). In those cases, Entourage data will not work optimally with Time Machine. Our recommendation is to exclude your Entourage Identity folder(s) in the Time Machine preferences and use alternative backup methods. We are committed to integrating with key Apple technologies and are weighing our options here for future releases.

When the topic of Entourage and databases comes up, it’s often about compatibility with Outlook personal store files (.pst). Entourage 2008 will continue to work with the PST Import Tool for Mac. It’s important to note that this tool is used to import Mac Outlook 2001 .pst files into Entourage. Directly importing Windows Outlook .pst files is not supported in Entourage 2008. We have heard from many of you that a Windows Outlook .pst solution is important. This feedback is factoring into the database development planning for future versions of Entourage. For now, there is an AppleScript based solution that I think is worth a look.

Another important consideration here is how we interact with Exchange’s database, “the store.” We’ve made some welcome improvements to our WebDav synchronization performance with Exchange in Entourage 2008. Through code reviews, customer feedback, and working closely with the Exchange team we’ve been able to find optimizations that will make the Exchange experience better. We solved efficiency bottlenecks and implemented smarter priority and thread utilization, especially with deep folder trees. You'll also have more control over the order folders sync with smarter prioritization of selected folders. This will result in faster Exchange folder updates and Entourage responsiveness will sharpen.

To conclude, I’d like to reiterate a point from my first post, that we understand that our Exchange customers want “an Exchange client on the Mac with features, performance, documentation, and reliability on par with Outlook.” This is a goal that will be achieved in stages, through Entourage 2008, its updates, and beyond. In Entourage 2008, the Exchange focus has been weighted towards reliability, better meeting management, performance, and documentation. While we’ve added important new enterprise features like OOF, Managed Folders, and Compliance Labels, and delivered features that will help you focus you on what you need to get done, we’ve concentrated on making things right in some rough spots. We know that there’s more important work to do, notably in the area of Task and Note sync with Exchange.

I look forward to upcoming posts from our team that will reveal our security feature work and some cool things we’ve done around To Do Flags. Entourage 2008 is a big step forward and we’re all anxious for you to see it.

Richard Kmieciak

It's About Time

rkmiec — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:51:00 GMT

During the planning and development of Entourage 2008, I’ve had a chance to meet with many Mac Exchange users and administrators to discuss the direction of Exchange in Entourage. I’ve read the comments, suggestions, and constructive criticism from a variety of sources, including recently here at Mac Mojo. One clear message has emerged from this feedback: “We want an Exchange client on the Mac with features, performance, documentation, and reliability on par with Outlook.” Of course, we hear this in different and sometimes more colorful terms, but I think it boils down the same. Today, I’d like to begin revealing the steps we’re taking towards meeting these expectations in Entourage. Up first is an absolutely critical Exchange area that we’ve done a lot of work to improve… the Calendar.

+ Click to enlarge

In the Exchange world, “Calendar” means a lot of things: delegation, free/busy, attendee tracking, invite mail flow, updates, recurrence exceptions, cancellations… I could go on, but the point is clear, there are a lot of moving parts involved in coordinating Calendar interactions, especially when workflows like delegation are involved. I’m excited to finally be able to show off some of the work we’ve done in the Entourage 2008 Calendar to improve the feature consistency and reliability of this coordination.

Note: You’ll notice some new looks in these screenshots. They’ll serve as a teaser for an upcoming post that will dive into the new look and user experience of the Entourage 2008 Calendar.

Accept, Tentative, and Decline from the Calendar
Attendees will now be able to reflect changes in meeting status directly. Calendar management actions, like declining a previously accepted meeting directly from the event, are more straightforward and consistent with Outlook. This fills a big functionality gap and addresses a top sore spot.

Meeting updates and cancellations
As a meeting organizer in Entourage 2008, you’ll have more flexibility in managing your updates and cancellations. You’ll now be able to choose whether to update your attendees about a change or cancellation and include comments. If attendees are added or removed from a meeting, you can choose to update all attendees or just those attendees whose status has changed.

Reply, Reply-all, and Forward
One nice thing in Outlook is the standard set of mail actions for meetings: “Reply, Reply All, and Forward.” It’s easy to quickly correspond with meeting participants through e-mail without opening or changing the meeting, just click “Reply” or “Reply To All.” Another useful Outlook option is what we affectionately call the “Party Crasher.” An attendee can easily “Forward” their meeting to others they think should participate. Those additional attendees will receive their own copy of the invitation and can choose to accept if they agree.

Stale Invites
One complaint we've consistently heard is that invites and their subsequent updates pile up in the Inbox. Despite the presence of multiple invites, only the most current invite is valid. Acting (e.g. Accepting) on a stale invite is at best confusing and at worst, the root cause of missed meetings and an unreliable Calendar. Sifting through multiple invites, finding the most recent, and acting on it is an effective, but ugly solution. Thankfully, Entourage 2008 is smarter here. By improving the identification and handling of incremental updates, stale invites are now labeled as “out of date” and more importantly its accept/tentative/decline buttons are disabled. This leaves only the current invite active and aligns closely with Outlook’s behavior. To further improve the situation, processed invites (e.g. accepted) will be moved to Deleted Items, also consistent with Outlook. This relatively small addition has a big impact on reliability.

Conflict and Adjacent Banners
Invite banner accuracy is another area we’ve improved, especially around delegation and single user concurrent Outlook and Entourage Calendar usage. In addition to shoring up the accuracy, we’ve added Outlook inspired time management banners: “Conflict” and “Adjacent”. When an invite comes in, its banner will indicate a conflict or if you’re running up against another meeting.

No response requested
There are times when an organizer doesn’t care to receive responses from attendees. For example, large company meetings will often have unmanageably large number of optional attendees and response tracking isn’t of much use. Entourage 2008 respects “No Response Requested” invites and will simply create the event on the Calendar without sending a response to the organizer.

Exchange 2007
Exchange 2007 users will see additional Calendar benefits in Entourage 2008. We've added support for Availability Web Service, which Andy mentioned in his Out of Office post. We're extending Entourage’s free/busy feature to take advantage of the Availability Web Service. With the right permissions, full free/busy details (location, subject, status) will be visible to assist with scheduling meetings.

Also, Exchange 2007 has transferred the responsibility of automatically accepting meetings tentatively from clients to the server. This is another seemingly small piece of the puzzle, but will add another important layer of consistency between Outlook and Entourage. It makes a big difference.

Another area where Exchange 2007 has taken responsibility from clients is Resource Scheduling. Exchange 2007 Resource Booking allows clients, like Entourage, to book resources without requiring additional client overhead and UI complexity. (For Exchange 2003, look here and here)
There are other highly requested features opening up for Entourage because of new capabilities in Exchange 2007. You’ll be hearing more about this soon…

It’s good to be able to show off some results from our efforts to improve Calendar UI consistency and workflow reliability with Exchange. We've also made substantial changes under the hood to better handle areas like recurrence patterns, negative exceptions, single instance cancellations, attendee tracking, and shared/delegated calendar interactions. We've partnered closely with our friends on the Exchange and Outlook teams on some important fixes and design changes from their end. The steps we've taken to build up this coordination within and between the moving parts represent a big move forward for Exchange in Entourage. I've heard and read the stories. We know there is real pain out there. Delegation, for one, is a serious point of frustration. We’ll soon have much more to say about Delegation and other Exchange topics we know you’re anxious for us to get into. OK, back to work…

- Richard

Office 2008 Enterprise Series: OOF Coming to Entourage

AndyRuff — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 04:31:00 GMT

I travel a lot. I'm in and out of our Seattle and Mountain View offices on a regular basis and spend way too much time sitting on the airplane. One of the most frustrating things about using Entourage 2004 is that every time I travel, I have no easy way to indicate to folks e-mailing me that I am unable to reply for the next few hours. Microsoft's culture is driven by e-mail communications and not responding to an important e-mail in the middle of a workday is the equivalent of skipping an important meeting or not answering your boss' phone calls. It’s a tough standard to meet when sitting offline at 30,000 feet.

There’s a real handy feature in Exchange, Outlook and Outlook Web Access called “Out of Office. ”Around here, we call it “OOF” (pronounced ooo-ph--see more historical details on the Exchange team blog). OOF allows you to configure your Exchange account to automatically reply to incoming messages with a quick note telling the sender that you are not able to respond because you are currently out of the office. Whenever I fly, I set my OOF to respond with the time I should be back on the ground and connected once again. The message is generated by the server, so I whenever I close my laptop and hop on the flight, I am confident that my coworkers are still notified of my current status.

This hasn’t always been very easy on the Mac. For years, you’ve had to launch Safari, log into Outlook Web Access, and hunt down my Out of Office settings. Then, after every flight and an Inbox full of new messages demanding attention, you must remember to log back into Outlook Web Access and turn the auto-reply off. Personally, I forget to do this a lot, only realizing my OOF message is still on a week later after a coworker replies with “are you still on vacation?”

With Entourage 2008, you now have the ability to configure your Out of Office settings without ever launching your web browser. It’s now right there, in Entourage’s Tools menu. Just like in Outlook 2007, you can configure your OOF to send separate replies based on who sent you a message and automatically turn on and off between certain date and times—no more worrying about remembering to turn off your OOF message.

For setting OOF, Entourage communicates with an Exchange 2007 server in the exact same way as Outlook 2007, through web services. As Craig mentioned, we’ve worked a lot with the Exchange team on determining ways we could bring new functionality to Entourage in the future and OOF is one of the first features taking this exciting new direction. For users on Exchange 2000 and 2003 servers, OOF will continue to work, though the more advanced features under “more options” are not available.

One question: the protocols we use to communicate with is exactly the kind of information we’ve included in updates to our Office Resource Kit and will be included in updates for Office 2008. However, we realize there's a lot more issues you’d like to hear detailed from us. We've been working on publishing Entourage-specific articles on TechNet. Any suggestions for topics that would make your life easier as someone in an enterprise with Entourage users?

a love letter to Entourage

nadyne — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 01:38:00 GMT

Aside from working on Entourage, I use it. No, that's not right: I don't use Entourage, I live in it. (I feel like those old infomercials -- I'm not only the president, I'm also a client!) I've had a couple of people ask me lately how I keep on top of everything that I'm doing. I'm not the sort of person whose monitor is covered with sticky notes, and I don't keep everything in my head. (Some might argue that I don't keep anything in there ... ) Entourage contains my entire life.

First and foremost, I am a big user of categories. My categories are all colour-coded. This is essential to me. Everyone in my address book is associated with a category. When I get email from people in my address book, their email is colour-coded in my inbox. (On any given day, I'd guess that less than 5% of the email that hits my main inbox is boring non-categorised black.) Here are some of my categories: MacBU, one for each of the application teams that I support, travel, services, personal. This means that I can tell, at a glance, what kind of traffic I'm getting in my inbox. Likewise, all of my calendar events have a category associated with them, so I can quickly tell what I'm spending the most time on this week. Tasks, notes, it's all colour-coded.

One of my goals in Entourage is to have an empty inbox. One way that I accomplish this is by extensive use of the Mailing List Manager and rules. I have more than 20 sub-folders that get the bulk of my email. I want my main inbox to only contain email that is addressed directly to me, which is the email that I’m most likely to need to do something with now. Of the stuff that ends up in my main inbox, I try to deal with it immediately upon reading it. This means responding to the email, creating a task/note from the email, or filing it away. I'm not perfect about this, but I'm getting better.

I use the Project Center to help me keep on top of projects. Some of these projects are pretty short-lived. For example, I usually set up a project for each usability test that I run, which means that those projects last for roughly 6 weeks from beginning to end. Others last a couple of years or more. The main benefit of the Project Center is that it gives me a directed view of what I'm working on: I can go in there and see only the emails, calendar events, tasks, and notes associated with that project, as well as the files on my hard drive associated with it. Depending on what I'm doing, I'd guess that roughly a third of my email/tasks/calendar/notes are associated with a project at any given time. And when I'm done with that project, archiving it is easy.

The best part about all of this? It gets even better in Entourage 2008. We've already shown an early version of my single most favourite feature, My Day, at Macworld Expo earlier this year. There's more, and I can't wait to tell you about it. Stay tuned.

The Times They Are A Changin'

AndyRuff — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:53:00 GMT

For many Entourage users prior to today, March 2007 was a month to lose sleep over. The United States Energy Policy Act of 2005 shifted the observation of Daylight Savings Time from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March. As a result, a majority of us living in the United States lose an extra hour of sleep in the month of March. Further, many software applications and gadgets simply didn't know about the new DST rules as they were designed and developed before the law was passed, Entourage among them.

Today’s release of the 11.3.3 update delivers a significant change to Entourage’s time zone support, including support for the new DST dates. Prior to this fix, events in the month of March 2007 (starting 3/11) were off by an hour for the majority of US customers. I highly recommend customers update to this release of Entourage prior to the beginning of Daylight Savings observation in 2007. The update seamlessy ensures that your calendar is updated to reflect the new DST rules and improves overall time zone reliability.

Behind the scenes, the issue stemmed from Entourage’s inability to support multiple daylight savings rules. The last major change in daylight savings across the United States was in 1987, well before the creation of Entourage. Our calendaring engine assumed that daylight savings would always be observed at the same time year after year. We've fixed these issues in this update. Entourage now supports multiple daylight savings rules and improves compatibility with the Mac OS’ time zone and daylight savings functions (support for the DST change was included in Mac OS 10.4.6).

-Andy