Categories in address book are not showing up in Entourage contacts

[pro_sherman]

Mac Mini
Office 2004

Mac OSX Tiger

My Mac Address Book has OVER 500 entries and all are categorized into
one or two categories (I have set up a total of 13 categories).
When I set up preferences in Entourage, I chose Turned on "Synchronize
contacts with Address Book and .mac" and chose the option "Merge"

All address book information is showing up in Entourage contacts,
EXCEPT Categories ....all Entourage contacts show up as having no
contacts.

 

[Barry Wainwright [MVP]]

Mac Mini
Office 2004

Mac OSX Tiger

My Mac Address Book has OVER 500 entries and all are categorized into
one or two categories (I have set up a total of 13 categories).
When I set up preferences in Entourage, I chose Turned on "Synchronize
contacts with Address Book and .mac" and chose the option "Merge"

All address book information is showing up in Entourage contacts,
EXCEPT Categories ....all Entourage contacts show up as having no
contacts.

That is correct and is by design, due to a fundamental difference in the way
that Entourage handles categories and Address Book handles Groups.

In address book, groups contain contacts (and more than one group can
contain the same contact). In Entourage, contacts have one or more
categories as a property. The difference may seem arcane, but it is crucial,
more for potential developments in Entourage or Address Book.

If entourage were to map groups to categories, what would happen if, in some
future version, either Address Book introduced categories, or Entourage
widens support for multiple address books - how would the mapping then be
affected, without breaking everyone's set ups?

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Mac Mini
Office 2004

Mac OSX Tiger

My Mac Address Book has OVER 500 entries and all are categorized into
one or two categories (I have set up a total of 13 categories).
When I set up preferences in Entourage, I chose Turned on "Synchronize
contacts with Address Book and .mac" and chose the option "Merge"

All address book information is showing up in Entourage contacts,
EXCEPT Categories ....all Entourage contacts show up as having no
contacts.

See what Barry wrote to get an understanding of why Entourage SyncServices
did not implement it that way (future possibilities).

If, however, you would still like Address Book Groups to sync to Entourage
Categories (and/or email Group, as you wish), you can do so using my Sync
Entourage-Address Book [PANTHER-TIGER] script available from

MacScripter.net <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

There are other correspondences the script does for you too (custom fields),
which SyncServices does not do.

It's free for 2 weeks so you can try it out to see if you like it. The very
first sync will be slow, later syncs will be fast. (You can even set it up
to run automatically.)


BUT TURN OFF SYNCSERVICES FIRST, before trying out the script. You must not
have both SyncServices and the script running simultaneously, or
SyncServices (not the script) might sometimes start deleting contacts.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[coffeegreek]

All address book information is showing up in Entourage contacts,
EXCEPT Categories

You can simply drag-and-drop mac address book contacts from within a
group into the Entourage address book. The group name will appear as a
new category in entourage and the dropped contacts will have that
category assigned to them.
George

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

You can simply drag-and-drop mac address book contacts from within a
group into the Entourage address book. The group name will appear as a
new category in entourage and the dropped contacts will have that
category assigned to them.

I never noticed that before, and am not sure which version it dates from.

It's very interesting, and demonstrates inconsistencies on the part of both
Microsoft and Apple - especially Apple. One can certainly wonder why MS
chose to make the Group-Category correspondence here but not in
SyncServices. But it's not really (or hardly) MS's doing:

If you drag a a contact from within an Address Book group to the desktop to
make a .vcf file. and then open the vcf in TextEdit, you'll see that it has
a
CATEGORIES:GroupName

line near the bottom ("GroupName" meaning the name of the group). So it's
APPLE who has made the correspondence of their Group concept to the more
prevalent Category concept. CATEGORIES: is evidently part of the .vcf
protocol now. Entourage has evidently chosen to acknowledge this when
importing .vcf files originating from anywhere, and assigns them the
category, even though - strangely - Entourage itself does not create
CATEGORIES: lines in its own .vcf files dragged from Entourage. (Not even
contacts created by dragging them from Address Book and with an appropriate
category assigned.) That's inconsistent of Entourage, preventing
drag-synching of category to group when dragging the other direction to
Address Book. But good, I'd say, that they honor the CATEGORIES line when
importing vcf files.

So it's really odd that Apple chose not to make the same correspondence in
SyncServices, but has separate schema for Groups and Categories (although
they don't use the latter). They could even have implemented multiple
groups/categories correspondences without problem (although the first group
assigned is always listed first in the CATEGORIES line, with no way to
change it, so when dragged to Entourage will become the Primary category).
Entourage has respected this distinction when syncing to SyncServices. But
it's really Apple who has been inconsistent here: listing the group names in
CATEGORIES line in vcf export, but not in Categories schema of SyncServices.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[coffeegreek]

I never noticed that before, and am not sure which version it dates from.

It's very interesting, and demonstrates inconsistencies on the part of both
Microsoft and Apple - especially Apple.

I only noticed that a couple of days ago while transfering my mobile
phone entries into Etnourage via mac AB. I was surprised to see it,
since I am sure I had tried similar things in the past. I use the
latest versions for both programs.

It's strange that Entourage does not export the right information in
vcf files, while it can import it. These files have such a simple
structure, one would imagine that there should be no problems. I have a
similar issue with calendar events, i.e. ics files exported from
entourage. They don't seem to have the right alarm/reminder
information. With audible reminders set in entourage preferences, the
exported .ics files have the following lines:
BEGIN:VALARM
ACTIONISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:REMINDER
whereas it should be ACTION:AUDIO. The files exported by iCal on the
other hand are correct. It's the same with sync services, entourage
does not treat audible reminders correctly, iCal does.

George

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

I have a
similar issue with calendar events, i.e. ics files exported from
entourage. They don't seem to have the right alarm/reminder
information. With audible reminders set in entourage preferences, the
exported .ics files have the following lines:
BEGIN:VALARM
ACTIONISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:REMINDER
whereas it should be ACTION:AUDIO. The files exported by iCal on the
other hand are correct. It's the same with sync services, entourage
does not treat audible reminders correctly, iCal does.

iCal has disparate alarm (reminder) types. In iCal you can create any one,
or several, of Message (i.e. Display), Message with Sound, Email, Open file,
Run script types of alarms. (Yes, you can have 5 Message and 4 Message with
Sound alarms for one event if you so fancy.) In Entourage, you can create
only a single reminder, and it is the Display (i.e. iCal "Message") type.
You cannot specify that a particular reminder for a particular event be a
Sound reminder. What you can do is set all reminders of all types - for
events and tasks alike - to have a sound, in Preferences. That's a
completely different thing: it attaches a sound to reminders - all
reminders. But the event itself doesn't know that. It's just a plain generic
reminder, as far as the event knows. And when exporting as an .ics, it's
compatible with any other PIM that may not even have sounds. If and when
Entourage chooses to implement separate alarm types on a per-event basis (I
wouldn't hold my breath) then it would have to specify the type in the .ics
too. But with its current implementation, it's just a generic reminder, so
DESCRIPTION:REMINDER is in fact accurate.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[coffeegreek]

Thanks Paul, this makes sense. I have resorted to writing a simple
script to change "display" to "audio" in the exported ics files and
that works OK for moving them to a mobile phone.
George