There are rumours of full Exchange support being added into the next release of Mac OS. What have you learned so far and how will that affect plans for Entourage?

Nadyne,

In the descriptions of the upcoming MobileMe, Apple mentioned that it would be compatible "with Mail, Address Book, and iCal on a Mac; Microsoft Outlook on a PC with Windows XP or Vista."

Conspicuously absent from all this is any mention of Entourage. Is the MacBU working with Apple to get Entourage on that list, too?

I'll admit that I used Entourage from the Office 2001 days when it was first released. But I moved over to the Apple native apps before the iPhone was released. Entourage had a number of advantages, but I need everything to sync seamlessly.

I would think that the MacBU folks would be concerned that Entourage has been left out of this discussion--at least publicly.

What's your take?

It looks like Mr. Jobs is after resolving those Entourage 2008 issues by just making his product interact with Exchange.

Maybe you can figure out how to port Sharepoint to Mac?

@Rick - Entourage currently syncs with .devices via Sync Services (introduced in Entourage 2004 in 11.2, improved in Entourage 2008), and thus syncs with .Mac today. Based on what Apple has announced thus far, MobileMe will behave in the same manner. If you liked Entourage in the past, you might want to try it again -- Entourage 2008 sports a new look for the calendar and great sync support. I've got an iPhone too, which I sync to Entourage. It's the single thing that keeps me on-track for all of my meetings.

@Eric - If you're in a business now using SharePoint, talk with your Microsoft account manager to tell them how important SharePoint support on your Mac is to you. Getting that kind of feedback through our internal mechanisms is hugely important for us as we make resource allocation decisions. Saying "some guy commented on the blog" isn't nearly as powerful than "the head of IT for a major company asked his account rep".

Nadyne, you keep on-track for all your meetings by syncing Entourage to your iPhone. What about your mail and Entourage and the iPhone?

Okay, Nadyne, I'd be interested in giving Entourage another whirl. How would I go about transferring iCal information into Entourage's calendar?

Okay, it looks like by simply turning on sync services, information in Mail and address book can be imported into Entourage. However, I don't see a way to import all my color coded calendar categories into Entourage. Correct me if I'm wrong, but only one particular iCal calendar can be synced, not all of them. That's a sticking point. I exported the individual iCal calendars and by dragging them onto the Entourage icon in the doc, the events import, but they don't keep the color coding. Also, address book contacts don't retain the nifty little photographs of everyone that I've added to the Apple address book. Any way to include those in Entourage? It's like you almost have me ready to go back, but there are these little details that are keeping me from it at least at the moment.

On a separate, issue, Nadyne, I'd like to see you or one of your Office colleagues address the features of the new citation features in Word 2008. I was poking around Word and it looks like there's a powerful citation manager completely integrated into the software--something that would beat out external programs that offer the same functionality such as Endnote, Bookends, or Sente. However, in the Helpfiles, the information about this feature is EXTREMELY scarce. We really need a tutorial of some sort since this is a new feature.

Will Office be extra whammy super charged on Snow Leopard? I know it was turbo charged for Leopard (even though it ran great on Tiger).

Thanks,

The MacBU has worked in fixes for Mac:Messenger 7 in Snow Leopard?

Thanx, gr8z for MacBU hard work.