Deployment of Entourage 2008 by itself

[Alan_Longmuir]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
Processor: intel
Email Client: Exchange

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.

 

[Diane Ross]

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?

The only link would be Office Notifications/Reminders. Office 2004 uses the
term Notifications, Office 2008 uses Reminders. Only change is in what it is
called.

I do know you can run both versions of all Office applications at the same
time _except_ for Entourage. I'm not sure which version of Notifications is
fired, but I have not seen any reports of problems.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have features that can trigger Office
notifications. The "flag for follow-up" button on Word's standard toolbar is
one such feature.

I would check the Startup Items for duplicate daemons in case both are being
launched. This could cause problems.

More on the daemon:

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.

I'm probably not the best person to answer this since I'm not in a work
environment, but I see no reason not to use this scenario. Exchange is
greatly improved in Entourage 2008.

One thing to consider in the installation is fonts. As long as you install
Office 2004 first, you are OK.

Office 2008 Font Install:

Office 2008 uses a different method for fonts and many fonts are new
versions. Office 2008 will install fonts to the /Library/Fonts/Microsoft
folder. By being at the root, then all users on the machine have access to
them and you don't get Office 2008 putting multiple copies on the machine
for each user.

The installer will scour /Library/Fonts/ and ~/Library/Fonts/ for fonts with
the same name and move them to /Library/Disabled Fonts/ or
~/Library/Disabled Fonts/ depending on where they were found.

The office newsgroup might be a place to follow-up on your concerns.

microsoft.public.mac.office

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/support_options/subnews.html>

 

[Alan_Longmuir]

Thanks Diane.