Deployment of Entourage 2008 by itself

[Alan]

Hi everyone,

I just have a quick question regarding the deployment of Entourage 2008.

Our workplace currently runs Office 2004 without Entourage deployed, we are
currently using Eudora for e-mail instead.
We have a project underway to deploy the new versions of Microsoft Office to
both our PC workstations and our Macs and to transition to an Exchange mail
service, thus the transition to Entourage.

I was wondering whether anyone is aware of any dependencies of Entourage
2008 on the other Office 2008 applications which come as standard? The PC
version of Outlook 2007 uses Word as the default editor for mail etc and I
was wondering if there were similar links between Entourage and the Mac
office applications?

If there are no dependencies then we may look at deploying Entourage 2008 by
itself and keeping Office 2004 until we are more confident file compatibility
issues etc are resolved with the newer version of Office.

Thanks for any help....

Alan.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi everyone,

I just have a quick question regarding the deployment of Entourage 2008.

Our workplace currently runs Office 2004 without Entourage deployed, we are
currently using Eudora for e-mail instead.
We have a project underway to deploy the new versions of Microsoft Office to
both our PC workstations and our Macs and to transition to an Exchange mail
service, thus the transition to Entourage.

I was wondering whether anyone is aware of any dependencies of Entourage
2008 on the other Office 2008 applications which come as standard? The PC
version of Outlook 2007 uses Word as the default editor for mail etc and I
was wondering if there were similar links between Entourage and the Mac
office applications?

If there are no dependencies then we may look at deploying Entourage 2008 by
itself and keeping Office 2004 until we are more confident file compatibility
issues etc are resolved with the newer version of Office.

Thanks for any help....

Alan.

Hi Alan,

You'll probably find more about this topic in the Entourage newsgroup
microsoft.public.mac.entourage

The best Exchange client is Entourage 2008 - especially if your
Entourage admin is doing a good job and keeps the server up to date with
service packs.

You can use Microsoft Word as the editor for Entourage, but you
certainly don't have to and it's not available as a default.

I don't know for sure if Word 2004 File > Send To > Mail recipient will
know to use Entourage 2008 (I think it does, but you should test this
first).

The database daemon (the program that manages reminders, calendar events
etc) could be a problem if you have the 2004 and the 2008 version
running simultaneously. The Entourage newsgroup I'm sure has postings
that explain how to prevent this collision from happening.

Microsoft has converters to deal with the new XML file format for Word
2004 and PowerPoint 2004, but so far has been unable to come up with one
for Excel. My own preference is to use NeoOffice 2.2.3 as the conversion
tool. For simple documents you can simply use NeoOffice and co-exist
with Windows office 2007 file formatted documents.

-Jim

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Alan:

Well, there are no "dependencies" as such. But the way Office is
constructed, whichever single application you install, you will get the
majority of Office installed. There is a very high level of commonality.

Each "Application" is to a certain extent just a "User Interface", and they
all use the same engine and gearbox modules

However, you do not need to worry about this, provided you allow the
Installer to do the install for you. It will install all the correct bits,
regardless of what you install.

As of this moment, the file compatibility issues are NOT resolved, and some
of them are ugly!

Entourage 2008 will work well, but I would leave the other applications on
the shelf at least until the first service pack comes out

Ensure that the user cannot start two versions of Entourage at the same
time, or all hell breaks loose 'Rage 2008 upgrades the database, after
which 2004 can't read it

So just delete the 2004 app AFTER the 2008 install to make sure they can't
start it.

Once you install the other applications, they will take over the file
associations (double-click) on the user's machine, and you cannot repossess
it. But the versions themselves will run side-by-side without a problem.
Just inform the users that if they want to open a file in the 2004 version,
they will need to start the application and then use File>Open from the
menu, or the document will open in the wrong version.

I would leave 2004 installed for the next two years at least. Your users
will need it

Cheers

Hi everyone,

I just have a quick question regarding the deployment of Entourage 2008.

Our workplace currently runs Office 2004 without Entourage deployed, we are
currently using Eudora for e-mail instead.
We have a project underway to deploy the new versions of Microsoft Office to
both our PC workstations and our Macs and to transition to an Exchange mail
service, thus the transition to Entourage.

I was wondering whether anyone is aware of any dependencies of Entourage
2008 on the other Office 2008 applications which come as standard? The PC
version of Outlook 2007 uses Word as the default editor for mail etc and I
was wondering if there were similar links between Entourage and the Mac
office applications?

If there are no dependencies then we may look at deploying Entourage 2008 by
itself and keeping Office 2004 until we are more confident file compatibility
issues etc are resolved with the newer version of Office.

Thanks for any help....

Alan.

--

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Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Nhulunbuy, NT, Australia. mailto:[email protected]