[ANN] The Entourage Help Blog: "Microsoft, ditch the Entourage Database!"

[William Smith]

"If E-mail is your life and you use Entourage then the Database file is
the single most important file on your computer."

One month from this week Microsoft MVPs will be attending the MVP Summit
held at Microsoft every 12-18 months. One month from today Mac MVPs will
get their opportunity to give feedback directly to the folks who make
Office for Mac. This is face-to-face feedback and discussion covering
everything from bugs to feature requests.

I'll be presenting topics for Entourage, including topics related to
Exchange. But one of my personal non-Exchange topics will be to ditch
the Database. The Database is unwieldy to back up, it's no longer needed
for fast searches and it prevents recovery of any data outside of using
the proprietary Microsoft Database Utility.

If you care about protecting your Entourage data then you should care
about the Database.

Continue reading at
<http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/03/microsoft_ditch_the_entourage_database.html>.

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>

 

[Allen]

{Allen}:

Nice to hear! I didn't even realize the impact my database was having on my
TimeMachine backup until I tried to restore another large file and found my
oldest backup was only 4 hours old!

BTW, since you will be there presenting Entourage topics, I hope you might
find a way to include this small but valuable feature idea, which I was
rather surprised not to see in Entourage 2008:

To the Entourage team: Please consider adding Smart Groups of contacts -
these would be like regular Groups of contacts, but would automatically
incorporate new or changed contacts that met definable criteria, much like
Smart Playlists in iTunes.

This would be hugely helpful in working with multiple groups who's rosters
change regularly. I have at least eight or nine committees I need to mail
to, and use Categories to sort them out. (Ideally, any contact metadata like
Category or Project, and data fields, like Company Name, area code, etc.
would be available in defining a Smart Contact Group.)

Today, I use an Address Book View for each of the committees I need to send
to, but there are no fewer than 10 clicks or other steps necessary to BCC
the members of a group from the Address Book View, compared with simply
entering the name of a Group. (Or Smart Group!)

Thanks,

Allen

 

[William Smith]

To the Entourage team: Please consider adding Smart Groups of contacts -
these would be like regular Groups of contacts, but would automatically
incorporate new or changed contacts that met definable criteria, much like
Smart Playlists in iTunes.

This would be hugely helpful in working with multiple groups who's rosters
change regularly. I have at least eight or nine committees I need to mail
to, and use Categories to sort them out. (Ideally, any contact metadata like
Category or Project, and data fields, like Company Name, area code, etc.
would be available in defining a Smart Contact Group.)

Today, I use an Address Book View for each of the committees I need to send
to, but there are no fewer than 10 clicks or other steps necessary to BCC
the members of a group from the Address Book View, compared with simply
entering the name of a Group. (Or Smart Group!)

Nice idea, Allen!

Definitely be sure to submit this to Microsoft officially using the Help
--> Send Feedback mechanism in any Office application.

While I can add this to my list I suspect it may be low on the
discussion agenda. (That doesn't stop me from including it on my list,
which will go into somebody's hands.) The number of items we can discuss
is limited by time so we usually reserve that for pressing issues.

Thanks for the feedback!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>