J
John Wilson
5/22 - I installed Office 2004 yesterday afternoon on my office Mac,
told the install wizard to import my previous identity (from Entourage)
and then delete all previous versions of Office (which on my Mac went
back to Office 98 in some esoteric settings in the Classic side). It
seems to have done all that correctly. When I opened Entourage, it
remembered all my settings, displayed my calendar, contacts and e-mail
correctly. So far so good.
THEN I noticed that e-mail was disappearing from my Exchange Inbox and
discovered that it was being moved to the LOCAL Inbox. As I kept
watching, mail continued to be moved from my Exchange mailboxes to my
local Inbox. Since I work in an IT dept, I thought I should let it go to
see what happened. By this morning there were over 3700 e-mails in my
local Inbox. I have a very extensive storage hierarchy on our Exchange
server (several hundred folders) and some e-mail from most of those
folders has already been moved to the local Inbox. Most of those e-mails
have an icon indicating that they are "on the server" (about 95%), but
others indicate that they are stored locally. Looking at my Exchange
account from Apple Mail, I see that the e-mail stored on my office Mac's
local Inbox is not showing up in the folders they are supposed to be in,
so to some degree or another they seem to have been truly moved (more
than the 5% that don't have the "on the server" icon).
Additional info - I have no rules set up in Entourage at all. Junk mail
is on, at the lowest setting, but that should move junk e-mail to the
server Junk Mail folder, not the local Inbox. This may have been
occurring in Entourage X as well. I hardly ever used it because I had
been seeing some strange e-mail moving around, like the symptom
described above.
Guesses at this point: Entourage may be trying to make a local copy in
case it gets disconnected from the server -- an Off-line copy -- but
since the folders don't exist locally, everything gets copied into the
Inbox. Counter argument: all mail from the Sent Items were moved to the
local Inbox, not the local Sent box, which does exist. (My server Sent
box is now empty!) (Not sure if both Sent folders have the same name,
however. Have to check.)
I quit Entourage so this anomalous process has stopped, but I now have
to refile 3700 e-mails!!!
If any of you have ideas why this is occurring, please let me know. At
this point I would say I can't recommend Entourage at all.
--
6/11 - I'm now on a team charged with deploying Office 2004 to our
university campus. I have to test all the features I can, so, back to
Entourage. The way I fixed the problem of Entourage moving everything to
the local Inbox (see above) was to uninstall all of Office 2004 and
reinstall without importing anything. (First I backed up the 3700
e-mails by dragging the local Inbox to the desktop, which worked well.)
I did this under the assumption that since Entourage wasn't doing the
same thing to my colleagues, then it must be something on my computer.
With a fresh install and NOT importing my old Entourage settings,
Entourage worked correctly; all my e-mail stayed put.
However there are new problems:
Public folders - It took quite a while to find account settings that
would allow me to download a list of our Exchange Public Folders. Most
likely several of the settings might have worked, but I had to have the
patience to let it run for 10-15 minutes before it began to pull up a
list. Not being over endowed with patience, I gave up too soon.
Eventually I waited long enough. Then, when I double-clicked on an item
that I know to be available to me (our announcement folders for
example), the whole list _disappeared_ and nothing opened! I finally
figured out that I need to SUBSCRIBE to each public folder that I want
to use. Single-click to select the public folder and then click the
Subscribe button (which only shows up for public folders and
newsgroups). The public folder list doesn't go away in that case, but it
does display _very bizarre behavior_! After subscribing to a public
folder, the whole folder list alternates between collapsing or expanding
completely. ?? If it had collapsed last and you had to drill down to
find the next folder to subscribe to, then, after subscribing, the whole
list would expand so every single folder was shown (in hierarchical
view). If it had expanded last time, after subscribing the list would
collapse completely so that only the top-level folders were visible. ???
Even more bizarre - after subscribing to several folders, they will
begin to populate (which is excruciatingly slow to start and very slow
to fill up). While the subscribed folders are filling, every few seconds
the folder list will expand or contract on its own, making it impossible
to continue the subscription process until Entourage is tired of filling
up public folders with messages. ????!!! I'm sure you all can imagine
what I'm thinking at this point. This bizarre behavior is not limited to
my computer; the only other colleague of mine to test it saw the same thing.
Project Center / Entourage Projects - We were able to successfully
create a test Project in Entourage and share it to another Mac user. The
caveat here is that, so far at least, it seems that you need to have
both computers connect to the shared network space using Appletalk, not
SMB. Testing is incomplete (and stalled - see below). Another issue is
that the shared tasks are only visible to Entourage 2004 users. Windows
users, even using Outlook 2003, will not see those tasks. I can't even
see the Project tasks in my Windows Outlook 2003. (I have both Mac and
Windows machines for testing.)
And back to the first problem - Entourage froze up during an attempt to
subscribe to another public folder, so I was forced to Force Quit. This
must have corrupted something again, because after restarting it, my
e-mail stared to migrate from their Exchange folders to the local Inbox
again, just as they did when I first installed it (see problems at top).
I have now uninstalled Office completely again and further testing will
have to wait until I can find the 2004 install disk.
If any of you have had more success and can help us figure out what's
going on, we would appreciate it greatly. At this point I would like to
throw out Entourage in favor of some other client, but I since I'm on
this deployment team, I have to continue testing.
John
told the install wizard to import my previous identity (from Entourage)
and then delete all previous versions of Office (which on my Mac went
back to Office 98 in some esoteric settings in the Classic side). It
seems to have done all that correctly. When I opened Entourage, it
remembered all my settings, displayed my calendar, contacts and e-mail
correctly. So far so good.
THEN I noticed that e-mail was disappearing from my Exchange Inbox and
discovered that it was being moved to the LOCAL Inbox. As I kept
watching, mail continued to be moved from my Exchange mailboxes to my
local Inbox. Since I work in an IT dept, I thought I should let it go to
see what happened. By this morning there were over 3700 e-mails in my
local Inbox. I have a very extensive storage hierarchy on our Exchange
server (several hundred folders) and some e-mail from most of those
folders has already been moved to the local Inbox. Most of those e-mails
have an icon indicating that they are "on the server" (about 95%), but
others indicate that they are stored locally. Looking at my Exchange
account from Apple Mail, I see that the e-mail stored on my office Mac's
local Inbox is not showing up in the folders they are supposed to be in,
so to some degree or another they seem to have been truly moved (more
than the 5% that don't have the "on the server" icon).
Additional info - I have no rules set up in Entourage at all. Junk mail
is on, at the lowest setting, but that should move junk e-mail to the
server Junk Mail folder, not the local Inbox. This may have been
occurring in Entourage X as well. I hardly ever used it because I had
been seeing some strange e-mail moving around, like the symptom
described above.
Guesses at this point: Entourage may be trying to make a local copy in
case it gets disconnected from the server -- an Off-line copy -- but
since the folders don't exist locally, everything gets copied into the
Inbox. Counter argument: all mail from the Sent Items were moved to the
local Inbox, not the local Sent box, which does exist. (My server Sent
box is now empty!) (Not sure if both Sent folders have the same name,
however. Have to check.)
I quit Entourage so this anomalous process has stopped, but I now have
to refile 3700 e-mails!!!
If any of you have ideas why this is occurring, please let me know. At
this point I would say I can't recommend Entourage at all.
--
6/11 - I'm now on a team charged with deploying Office 2004 to our
university campus. I have to test all the features I can, so, back to
Entourage. The way I fixed the problem of Entourage moving everything to
the local Inbox (see above) was to uninstall all of Office 2004 and
reinstall without importing anything. (First I backed up the 3700
e-mails by dragging the local Inbox to the desktop, which worked well.)
I did this under the assumption that since Entourage wasn't doing the
same thing to my colleagues, then it must be something on my computer.
With a fresh install and NOT importing my old Entourage settings,
Entourage worked correctly; all my e-mail stayed put.
However there are new problems:
Public folders - It took quite a while to find account settings that
would allow me to download a list of our Exchange Public Folders. Most
likely several of the settings might have worked, but I had to have the
patience to let it run for 10-15 minutes before it began to pull up a
list. Not being over endowed with patience, I gave up too soon.
Eventually I waited long enough. Then, when I double-clicked on an item
that I know to be available to me (our announcement folders for
example), the whole list _disappeared_ and nothing opened! I finally
figured out that I need to SUBSCRIBE to each public folder that I want
to use. Single-click to select the public folder and then click the
Subscribe button (which only shows up for public folders and
newsgroups). The public folder list doesn't go away in that case, but it
does display _very bizarre behavior_! After subscribing to a public
folder, the whole folder list alternates between collapsing or expanding
completely. ?? If it had collapsed last and you had to drill down to
find the next folder to subscribe to, then, after subscribing, the whole
list would expand so every single folder was shown (in hierarchical
view). If it had expanded last time, after subscribing the list would
collapse completely so that only the top-level folders were visible. ???
Even more bizarre - after subscribing to several folders, they will
begin to populate (which is excruciatingly slow to start and very slow
to fill up). While the subscribed folders are filling, every few seconds
the folder list will expand or contract on its own, making it impossible
to continue the subscription process until Entourage is tired of filling
up public folders with messages. ????!!! I'm sure you all can imagine
what I'm thinking at this point. This bizarre behavior is not limited to
my computer; the only other colleague of mine to test it saw the same thing.
Project Center / Entourage Projects - We were able to successfully
create a test Project in Entourage and share it to another Mac user. The
caveat here is that, so far at least, it seems that you need to have
both computers connect to the shared network space using Appletalk, not
SMB. Testing is incomplete (and stalled - see below). Another issue is
that the shared tasks are only visible to Entourage 2004 users. Windows
users, even using Outlook 2003, will not see those tasks. I can't even
see the Project tasks in my Windows Outlook 2003. (I have both Mac and
Windows machines for testing.)
And back to the first problem - Entourage froze up during an attempt to
subscribe to another public folder, so I was forced to Force Quit. This
must have corrupted something again, because after restarting it, my
e-mail stared to migrate from their Exchange folders to the local Inbox
again, just as they did when I first installed it (see problems at top).
I have now uninstalled Office completely again and further testing will
have to wait until I can find the 2004 install disk.
If any of you have had more success and can help us figure out what's
going on, we would appreciate it greatly. At this point I would like to
throw out Entourage in favor of some other client, but I since I'm on
this deployment team, I have to continue testing.
John