We’ve been working hard for the last week and a half to bring Entourage users today’s 12.1.4 update. It’s incredibly frustrating when we get through a release process and a new issue is introduced by an update.  When we start to hear feedback and customer reports about issues with an update, I simply cringe because so much work goes into preventing that from happening. Unfortunately, the recent Office for Mac 2008 12.1.3 update introduced a bug that prevented some Entourage users from sending meeting invites to others. We’re sorry.

However, we also believe it’s better to pair an apology with a solution.  With that in mind, with the just released 12.1.4 update, meeting invites will be working as expected once again for all Entourage users.

A lot of work goes into every update release to make sure that we are improving the product's quality. With every update, each and every change that goes into the release is under tight review.  There are multi-developer code reviews, focused test passes, and verifications with targeted customers who reported the issue we are targeting to fix.  Even then, sometimes things do not work out.  With 12.1.3, we did all of the above, yet two cases slipped-through:

    
1. If you set-up your Exchange account after you configured an IMAP or POP account, invites would fail.  In reviewing the code and test planning, an assumption about the order of account creation impacting meeting invites was unknown to anyone.  We've made some changes to make sure that any such assumptions about ordering are now irrelevant both in Entourage’s code and in our testing efforts.
        
    
2. There are some very rare cases in which the Drafts folder on your Exchange server can no longer be properly accessed by either Entourage or Outlook for certain types of operations.  The 12.1.3 update changed Entourage so that all invites were moved to your Exchange drafts folder, stamped with a few properties to make sure they showed-up correctly in Outlook, and then sent along the way.  This was a pretty big change and exactly the right way to solve the Outlook-to-Entourage calendar interop issue we fixed in 12.1.3, but it introduced a problem where those few users with malfunctioning Drafts folders also were unable to send invites. 
       
       We've addressed this by providing a fall-back mechanism that won't prevent you from sending an invite but will warn you that there are problems with your Drafts folder that your Exchange administrator may need to resolve.  In addition, we learned to do additional testing around cases where a mailbox does not behave as expected on the Exchange server. A lot of times these problems are not apparent to you, but they can result in some very difficult issues for a client like Entourage or Outlook to handle.

Please download 12.1.4 and enjoy sending meeting invites out again.

-Andy