R
rob.cape
After spending 2days browsing the net and countless swear words at the
inefficiency of integration between outlook and entrourage i share my
experiences. First of all, Microsoft needs a swift kick in the butt!!
I work in the computer industry and have done so for many years, so i
can only imagine the frustration of the standard user out there.
First of all you have to get the outlook files transferred into .Mbox
format this can be done in two ways, either using mozilla thunderbird
to import the mail from outlook and then as per Dave Riches article
http://www.riches.com.au/articles/export-outlook-entourage.html to
rename and move across. This is very time consuming and you lose
contacts ,calendar and tasks along the way. O by the way off the
subject, for those of you needing to write to an ntfs external drive
from your Mac, you will need MACFuse and NTFS-3G, google it. The
second way and reccommended if you prepared to fork out a couple of
dollars is using outlooktomac(o2m) by a company called
littlemachines.Both these methods create .mbox files for each of you
folders in outlook, so if you have hundreds like i do its time
consuming. something to note with 02m they convert dates to a
standard format if any of your mail msgs are found to be incorrectly
formatted. There is no option to select all when prompted with the
first one so you have to literally sit through the whole conversion
process. Once your conversion is complete place the folder with your
mbox files in onto some sort of portable media and copy onto the mac
desktop.
Now the headaches started for me, first of all the import function on
entourage2008 does not work!! the mbox files show as greyed out!!!
argggggg!!!! MS Products... Open Entourage and minimise,open the
folder with the mbox files and select them all (click and drag a box
around them, i changed the mouse options in the mac to perform a click
and hold then drop on second click, now while these items are selected
and movable with you mouse hold the ctrl key in and navigate the
pointer to minimised entourage, a couple of seconds pass and entourage
maximises, move selected items to a folder like inbox and drop them
there. Now the very confusing part of this, i had performed this
procedure multiple times and nothing appeared to happen... Entourage
would freeze for a while (its actually moving the files) then come
back to normal. I closed and opened Entourage still nothing.. by
chance and out of frustration as the write ups suggest this should
work, i started going through entourage options, found something under
view called EXPAND ALL, wow.. wait for it.... suddenly all my folders
appear, note to those thinking i didnt try the expand folder button in
the list pane....I DID!!!.
So now we have all mail imported (please note that for some reason the
conversion process marks all mails received dates as the date you did
the import, view by sent to get some order again)
Okay now by pure fluke i found out the following, i had first tried to
use a program called emailchemy to convert from mbox format into an
entourage archive .rge file to move into entourage as mbox import
using import funtion in entourage was failing. This seemed to work but
when looking for the messages after opening the archive file in
entourage they were missing. However the important part to note is
that my entire folder structure had been imported minus the messages,
this is really helpfull if you have a complicated folder structure. So
now the messages from all the mbox folders can be moved into the
correct structures... phewwwww....
Ok next, calendar if you used O2M is as simple as going to the
converted file and opening it, unfortunately its moved into ICAL and
not entourage.
Contacts works the same and is dragged using the mbox method above,
but not into entourage contacts, will only drop into the standard MAC
address book.
Once you have completed contacts and calendar steps open entourage2008
go to the preferences option on the entourage tab on the top, select
this and then select sync services. There should be an option to sync
with mac address book and ICAL(mac calendar) this process might take
awhile so leave entourage open. Eventually it populated all fields for
me.
Right i think this about covers it. Good luck to all.
inefficiency of integration between outlook and entrourage i share my
experiences. First of all, Microsoft needs a swift kick in the butt!!
I work in the computer industry and have done so for many years, so i
can only imagine the frustration of the standard user out there.
First of all you have to get the outlook files transferred into .Mbox
format this can be done in two ways, either using mozilla thunderbird
to import the mail from outlook and then as per Dave Riches article
http://www.riches.com.au/articles/export-outlook-entourage.html to
rename and move across. This is very time consuming and you lose
contacts ,calendar and tasks along the way. O by the way off the
subject, for those of you needing to write to an ntfs external drive
from your Mac, you will need MACFuse and NTFS-3G, google it. The
second way and reccommended if you prepared to fork out a couple of
dollars is using outlooktomac(o2m) by a company called
littlemachines.Both these methods create .mbox files for each of you
folders in outlook, so if you have hundreds like i do its time
consuming. something to note with 02m they convert dates to a
standard format if any of your mail msgs are found to be incorrectly
formatted. There is no option to select all when prompted with the
first one so you have to literally sit through the whole conversion
process. Once your conversion is complete place the folder with your
mbox files in onto some sort of portable media and copy onto the mac
desktop.
Now the headaches started for me, first of all the import function on
entourage2008 does not work!! the mbox files show as greyed out!!!
argggggg!!!! MS Products... Open Entourage and minimise,open the
folder with the mbox files and select them all (click and drag a box
around them, i changed the mouse options in the mac to perform a click
and hold then drop on second click, now while these items are selected
and movable with you mouse hold the ctrl key in and navigate the
pointer to minimised entourage, a couple of seconds pass and entourage
maximises, move selected items to a folder like inbox and drop them
there. Now the very confusing part of this, i had performed this
procedure multiple times and nothing appeared to happen... Entourage
would freeze for a while (its actually moving the files) then come
back to normal. I closed and opened Entourage still nothing.. by
chance and out of frustration as the write ups suggest this should
work, i started going through entourage options, found something under
view called EXPAND ALL, wow.. wait for it.... suddenly all my folders
appear, note to those thinking i didnt try the expand folder button in
the list pane....I DID!!!.
So now we have all mail imported (please note that for some reason the
conversion process marks all mails received dates as the date you did
the import, view by sent to get some order again)
Okay now by pure fluke i found out the following, i had first tried to
use a program called emailchemy to convert from mbox format into an
entourage archive .rge file to move into entourage as mbox import
using import funtion in entourage was failing. This seemed to work but
when looking for the messages after opening the archive file in
entourage they were missing. However the important part to note is
that my entire folder structure had been imported minus the messages,
this is really helpfull if you have a complicated folder structure. So
now the messages from all the mbox folders can be moved into the
correct structures... phewwwww....
Ok next, calendar if you used O2M is as simple as going to the
converted file and opening it, unfortunately its moved into ICAL and
not entourage.
Contacts works the same and is dragged using the mbox method above,
but not into entourage contacts, will only drop into the standard MAC
address book.
Once you have completed contacts and calendar steps open entourage2008
go to the preferences option on the entourage tab on the top, select
this and then select sync services. There should be an option to sync
with mac address book and ICAL(mac calendar) this process might take
awhile so leave entourage open. Eventually it populated all fields for
me.
Right i think this about covers it. Good luck to all.