Entourage 2008 - 30 Day Review

I am a switcher.  I have been running a Windows business desktop for the better part of 12 years.  Over the last year, I have been trying out an Apple Macbook Pro.  I purchased it along with VMware's Fusion product, so that I could still run my Windows Only business applications while I tried out Mac OSX.  Slowly over the past few months I have migrated to Apple versions of the business products I used daily.  Everything from MS Office to SAP's Gui client runs well on OSX.  The one thing that I had been hesitant about moving to was Entourage.  I have used outlook so long that all of the key combo's macros, etc, are second nature.  But, in the interest of giving this experiment its just due, I made the change over to Entourage.

At first, the change was pretty rough.  I have a little over 60k items in my mailbox.  Over a Gig connection it took roughly 3 days in the office to get Entourage caught up to my Outlook.  I think this may be due to how Entourage talks to Exchange, however it seemed very inefficient.  Rather than updating new items, and then backfilling the older data, it did the opposite.  This pushed the test back three days while I waited for it to be at a usable point.

Once I was able to begin using Entourage, I was pretty surprised.  The interface is decently different from that of Outlook, but its a good blend of Outlook and Apple Mail.  Everything works in and out of the client as it should.  Attachments I think actually work a little better because all of your options are displayed without having to click on any single item.  

Calendar is pretty close to Outlook.  Very easy to use with a straight forward interface.  It can also be setup to use SyncServer to push your Entourage appointments, and contacts for that matter, to your iCal and Apple Addressbooks.  This is useful if you plan on getting this data to your iPhone or iPod device. 

It will be very interesting to see if this ends up working with MobileMe, etc.