Entourage 2008 and Time Machine don't get along

call you what? 'names' OK, you are 'names'! Entourage is super sucky - that HUGE unmanageable database is a nightmare and just asking to be corrupted!

I have the change to get a beta version of Office 2008, since I am a Tech journalist (I won't go into details since we were asked to now write anything until the launch). But I can tell you that Entourage 2008 sucks BIG TIME !

1) They still use LDAP
2) It still use the old anchor X.509 (or something like this) meaning that you will NOT be able to use SSL with leopard... There is a workaround but under terminal. Straight out of the box it won't work (unless they fix this)
3) The WORST EXCHANGE EXPERIENCE EVER ! Your company use Exchange (like we do?) then DO NO WAIST YOUR TIME, just use IMAP on exchange and not the exchange feature of Entourage. This soft is NOT able to synch any change in your mailbox ! Let's says that you organize your email in folder, Entourage will do this ON your MAC, but not on your Exchange mail box ! Just log afterward on your OMA/OWA or on your pocket PC you will find out that ALL new email are still UNREAD and not in any folders ! (even after few days)

There is actually not any real alternative to Office 2007 on PC and this on ANY other OS... U want to work correctly in a Office environment ? do not count on Microsoft to help you on Mac, just take Boot Camp and use Office 2007.

I am waiting for the final version of Office for MAC 2008 to finish my article but it does not look good at all ! At least the Mail 3 APP on my MacBookPro has a better Exchange experience than Entourage 2008.

Yeah, TimeMachine seriously needs more configurability to handle different sizes of files and other conditions.

As for Office, as a home-only user of Mac I would only buy it for Word and Excel. I love iWork but it is so slow compared to Office on Windows. I've never used Entourage but if it's anything like Outlook I'd rather stick with Mail/iCal anyway. I despise Outlook. It's WAY overly complicated and nearly impossible to configure properly (try playing with message view settings--what a nightmare).

also, virtual machines from Parallels (yuk), VMWare et al are a single file, and any little change to it (like happens during booting) necessitates backup of this file (like iPhoto via Ralph)....so, blaming MS is as usual ultra narrow minded

This is not a bug or an issue with Time Machine, it's just something app developers need to deal with.

Apple has provided developers with documentation on how to integrate their apps with Time Machine, and deal with Time Machine related issues.

A couple of questions:

1) Has anyone noticed that the new iPhoto now stores all photos in one database?

2) Has anyone seen how iPhoto works with Time Machine? You can literally browse your database of photos and restore individual photos.

I am not sure if Apple exposes this same functionality to other apps, but if they don't Microsoft should complain, because Microsoft has been chastised for not giving out developer info on operating system functionality.

There is no reason Entourage couldn't work similarly to iPhoto, but that would require Microsoft to do some extra effort...

This is definitely a Time Machine issue. And the fix is really quite simple. Add functionality to Time Machine to backup certain folders on a different increment. For instance the default increment is hourly, for the entourage db containing folder change it to daily or weekly or some other more sensible increment. Ditto for any other folder that may contain a large ever-changing file like this.

I'm an IT Manager and ever since I switched from Entourage / Apple Mail to Thunderbird I have had almost zero problems for my 40 users...

Anyways, you know the saying of all your eggs in one basket so one big database sounds like a disaster to me!

"Well, you might be interested in proprietary lockin by making it impossible or nearly so for your users to access their data without your application."


That's a Microsoft tactic alright. I only bought Office so that I could use Entourage, which was the ONLY email client that could access my Hotmail account. Then I got an Intel Mac and it was so painful to use under Rosetta that I ended up selling it on eBay and switching to Gmail. I now use Neo Office for word processing and spreadsheets and haven't looked back.

P.S. Hotmail is awful. Everything is labeled incorrectly. The Inbox should be labeled Junk because that's where all the junk mail ends up, and the Junk box should be labeled Inbox, because that's where all of my important emails go.

I am currently using Entourage 2004 -- which has the same issue that 2008 will have -- and Time Machine, and it works ok. Sure, my 4+ gig Entourage database takes a couple minutes to back up each hour, but it is no huge deal.

Like several others on this thread, I think Entourage is the only reason to buy MS Office for the Mac, and for me, it is a compelling reason. I am no fan of Microsoft, but the Mac BU does a good job with Entourage. No other Mac program does what it does, as well as it does it. In comparison, using Mail/iCal/Address Book together is just clunky.

In my mind, this is a major opportunity for a software developer -- give us a iWork work-alike that has Entourage functionality and I will buy a copy for every Mac in our office. And that will be the end of MS Office in our office.

And what about Thunderbird? I have lots of emails in my Thunderbird mbox and mbox is the way I like. Thousands of thousands of emails as files will just make it a bis mess.

I agree that it's a Time Machine problem - backup on a bit level would be more propriate.