shahine.com/omar/

homepage | Send mail to the author(s) contact

yet another Microsoft blogger

# Friday, May 21, 2004

« Haha, deny explorer access to reg settin... | Main | Media Center Front Panel Display SDK »

Entourage 2004

I've been soo busy this week that I haven't even had the time to enjoy some of the wonderful things the press are saying about Office 2004. I worked on Entourage 2004 for about 16 months before moving on to Virtual PC. I just saw this review in PC Magazine and it had this wonderful paragraph

Entourage's main competition comes from Apple's own Mail, Address Book, and iCal apps, which are preloaded on every new Mac. While the price is right, Entourage's various utilities are so thorough and well integrated that it puts Apple's efforts a distant second in quality.

I couldn't be happier about that. I am really proud of this release, and of the people that made it all happen. One of the things I spent about 6 months working on is the S/MIME v3 support that we added to Entourage. This was a huge undertaking for us and I had an amazing developer and tester working on it with me. Getting my head wrapped around PKI, X.509 and S/MIME took a very long time, and trying to design a simple solution to meet the needs of our users took even longer. I'm happy that our users can now send secure encrypted/signed e-mail.

Another feature I worked on was the DAV Mail replication that we added to replace our IMAP Mail solution for Exchange. Entourage 2004 has a local sync model just like cached exchange in Outlook 2003.

But my favorite feature of Entourage 2004 is the three column view that Dennis designed (based on Outlook 2003's implementation).

Microsoft | Software
Posted Saturday, May 22, 2004    Permalink    Comments [6]  View blog reactions

Related posts:
10 Things I've learned in 10 years at Microsoft
I have seen the future... Microsoft RoundTable
Art
Steve and Bill
Apple Commercial on Vista
Researcher Jim Gray missing at sea

 

Friday, May 21, 2004 7:12:30 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Omar, Entourage 2004 is great. I don't think I could ever go back to Mail/iCal/Address Book now, and I could certainly never put up with Outlook after this. I only have one question -- two features seem to have gone away, and I want to know if there's any chance of a future update bringing them back:

1) When I reply to a message, there seems to be no option to switch the reply to a "Reply to All" anymore. I have to close my message and start over. That really, really, really, really, really, really sucks. Why did you all take this very necessarily feature away?

2) Why is it still impossible to add a hyperlink in an HTML email? I don't like having to write my email in Word to get this functionality. It was a klutzy feature before, being tied into the terrible IE browser. But now it's just... gone? How hard would it have been to add a simple means to Insert --> Hyperlink... and give us a dialogue to enter the link and the text the link should be applied to?

Is there any chance a maintenance upgrade to Entourage 2004 might fix these two issues? Because these are pretty glaring omissions in an otherwise nearly perfect release.
Kirk McPike
Saturday, May 22, 2004 7:59:42 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
At the top of the window of a reply is a line that says

"This reply will be sent to the sender only.
Reply to all"

"Reply to all" is a link which switches it to 'Reply All'

then the banner says "This reply will be sent to all recipients of the original message. Reply to sender only."

TjL
Monday, May 24, 2004 3:25:43 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Oh sure.. Give all the credit for the 3 column view to Dennis. You don't mention the 300+ hours it took the dev (me) to implement it, or the countless hours of meetings with Dennis to make changes and finalize the spec. GEESH!!!

Yes, this was a shameless plug. :)
Rob
Monday, May 31, 2004 6:50:04 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Maybe you guys could explain why 3 column view is so hard to implement... it seems like the preview pane was simply moved to another part of the screen.. Doesn't seem so complex.
robyn
Tuesday, July 20, 2004 5:09:38 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Omar, I really like the new Entourage 2004. It looks great and works fine.

There is only one problem, it keeps crashing while I try to Sync my SPV200 using pocket mac pro 3.0 With office X it worked fine.

Will there be an update to fix this?

Regards,
René
René
Tuesday, August 03, 2004 7:06:41 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Interesting. I like the app a lot

Is there a config somewhere in 2004 that doesn't include yourelf in the reply all list when you reply all?

I'm sick of getting emails I sent back to me.

Was it in a previous version? (I'm still on V.x for a while yet)

I don't really want to implement a rule.
PhilB
Comments are closed.