Moving from Entourage to Mail under SnowLeopard with Exchange Server 2007

[pnoble]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
Processor: Intel
Email Client: Exchange

To anyone considering this, the dividends may be significant, if my experience is anything to go by.

Configuring and connecting to Exchange Server using Snow Leopard Exchange client took a few moments, to the shock of our Windows oriented sys admin staff, and email, contact and calendar syncing began.

Disc space: while the size of my Exchange server file was 6GB, the same file in Entourage had grown to around 36GB (!), this despite the awkward process of compressing the file every few months. After syncing with Mail and erasing the Entourage data file I gained around 30GB of free disc space, not an insignificant amount of found space on a 128GB Air!

Performance: I was observing spontaneous spikes of near 100% CPU usage from Entourage when open even in the background. In operation Entourage had become more and more sluggish of late and had been crashing more and more frequently. I wonder if this was related to file size (~39,000 emails in total). Since removing Entourage, general computer performance has increased significantly and Mail performance is perfect. The fan on my Air has gone from almost continually on to very rarely.

Functionality: all the craziness of Entourage is gone. I am back to the normal email experience I used to have with Outlook, and more. HTML emails can be simply forwarded and web site content pasted into emails, my iPhone messages can finally be viewed in Sent mail (!), searches under sent don't list by sender(!), I can now access Exchange server distribution lists.....see all calendars...The only thing I miss is the right side viewing panel, now below, but I' be surprised if Apple doesn't add this option soon.

For good measure I removed Office 2008 completely and I am finding that Pages, Numbers and Keynote seem to handle Office files just fine and considering that Excel and Word for Mac are not even macro compatible, I'm not sure I have lost anything and maybe gained in the elegance of Apple's applications and their rapid (yearly) rate of evolution. I am not myself a power user, more often a recipient than producer of Office files. But no complaints so far in terms of open/change/save/create compatibility.

As a company we have switched to buying MacBook Pros for our staff - sexy, excellent reliability and now great value - a decision that has been very well received, and although everyone has been running Windows on them, this is changing.

My thanks to Diane Ross and others at Mactopia who have diligently tried to help with various Entourage related issues since I personally switched to the Mac after a year plus of Vista hell.

Regards,

Paul

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Hi Paul,

A couple of comments (because I suspect it could help other users
experiencing the same issues):

[...]

Disc space: while the size of my Exchange server file was 6GB, the same
file in Entourage had grown to around 36GB (!), this despite the awkward
process of compressing the file every few months. After syncing with
Mail and erasing the Entourage data file I gained around 30GB of free
disc space, not an insignificant amount of found space on a 128GB Air!

There was something wrong with your database. Instead of compressing, I
would have rebuild the database and eventually emptied the Exchange
cache.

Performance: I was observing spontaneous spikes of near 100% CPU usage
from Entourage when open even in the background. In operation Entourage
had become more and more sluggish of late and had been crashing more and
more frequently. I wonder if this was related to file size (~39,000
emails in total).

[...]

Probably if you had a lot of e-mails in the inbox itself. Entourage
treats it differently and syncs it more frequently.
If it's huge, it makes the CPU spike in the way you are describing here.


[...]

my iPhone messages can finally be viewed in Sent mail (!),

I believe this was a known issue requiring a simple patch to be applied
to the faulty Exchange server.
It might have been fine if you had been using Entourage EWS instead of
the regular version too.

For good measure I removed Office 2008 completely and I am finding that
Pages, Numbers and Keynote seem to handle Office files just fine and
considering that Excel and Word for Mac are not even macro compatible,
I'm not sure I have lost anything and maybe gained in the elegance of
Apple's applications and their rapid (yearly) rate of evolution.

Apple made a nice suite.
Numbers and Pages are still a bit far from my needs (but getting better
with every version).
Keynote is definitively a nice product.

I hope you'll like your new setup Paul


Corentin