Why on earth are these things not fixed on 11.2.3

[Phillip A. Harris]

Ok, let's start with an email thread from a while back...

I was basically asking the following questions:

The Calendaring function within Entourage has two, in my opinion fundamental
and indispensable features missing/omitted/broken -

A) when an invite to a meeting arrives via email, you have the choice to
accept, refuse or accept tentatively - great, but there is no check to see
whether you have an existing meeting at the same time or or at a time that
overlaps with the proposed meeting.

This is basic to any calendaring application - Entourage uses a single
database for everything - it's right there in the same DB as the acceptance
or rejection gets written to!!!!

Double, treble bookings are inevitable. It relies on the sender of the
invite to decide based on the invitees schedule to invite or not.. This is
not acceptable in any sense. Not to mention the Windows version (Outlook)
clearly has this functionality built in.

B) "Resources" do not exist as a notion. If I am looking for a meeting
room, I have to invite a whole bunch of meeting room, look through their
schedules and hope I find an available one. Not to mention other "resources"
- again a basic feature available in Outlook.


On October 20th of last year (2005) a response came back from the Entourage
Program Manager....(name unknown) via a Technical Account Manager in
Microsoft.


Snip...


As you know, the Entourage team has been adding additional Exchange
features/support with each release of Office, including major updates as
recently as Office 2004 SP2, released last month.
We're very aware of both of the issues raised by your customer, but with
each release of Office/Entourage, we need to make painful decisions about
which features to add and which will have to wait for a future release.
I'll make sure to add the comments from your customer to the "bugs" tracking
these issues so they can be taken into consideration when these two
features are considered again.

In the meantime, there is an external link about the amount of work that has
been already done for to beef up our Exchange support:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/entourage2004/entourage2004.aspx?pid=e
xup2004
"


Again we know this isn't the response that you wouldn't like to see but rest
assured that we take the feedback seriously and are working to address those
issues in the next feature release for entourage.

Snip.....

Guess what? NO PROGRESSS - Truly unbelievable....

Phil

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Why is it "truly unbelievable"? 11.2.3 was not announced as a general or
Exchange feature release, like SR 2 (11.2) was. When SR 2 came out last
summer, and again more specifically at Macworld SF in January, Microsoft
announced that they were working on enabling Tiger SyncServices and
Spotlight features for Entourage, as soon as possible. Many people had been
asking for this ever since Tiger was released last spring. So that's what
they've done. They have managed to include a few bug fixes along the way.

It is already quite exceptional that they introduce big new features like
the Exchange features of 11.2 and the SyncServices and Spotlight features of
11.2.3 in a free service update. (And back in Office v. X 10.1.4 introduced
both Exchange and IMAP features.) More usually you have to wait for a new
major version for new features - service releases are generally just fixing
bugs.

You can rest assured that the features you're hoping for will be considered
and probably addressed at some point. The next "feature release" referred to
by the Program Manager you quote most likely means Office 12. You shouldn't
expect a feature release before then. There's a huge, huge amount of things
they must be working on, including moving to Xcode and creating Universal
Binaries for MacIntels, the new Office 12 file formats, and lots of things
we have no idea about. Every time they have to release an update to 2004, it
takes away from the next feature release (Office 12).

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[Phillip A. Harris]

Please, these are not new features, they are existing, standard features in
current Microsoft products as well as universally standard features in any
professional calendaring tool.

I am very well aware of the work going on with "12" and am reasonably
considerate of the load on what must be a relatively constrained development
group within MS. *But* the reason MS gets the revenue they do from Mac
users is because we *have* to use the tools in Office, as opposed to wanting
to.

Other comments in line....

A: Open your calendar and examine the meetings and adjacent times.
Personal accountability. Look, think, respond.

And the things I think are fundamental are in Outlook, because???? So are
you saying Windows users aren't expected to show the same level of
responsibility ??

B: Everyone should have read access to the "Resource rooms" Add those
calendars as if you were a delegate. You'll be able to read, and
therefore view their availability.

Right.. In any reasonably sized campus, where there are hundreds of possible
rooms/resources etc.. Sigh..

C: Progress?!? Are you serious? You can use the GAL, and Public
Folders, Public Calendars and Address Books as of recently. Meeting
modifications/cancellations are appropriately handled.

Gee a calendaring system that handles these things.. Sorry, those things
*should* be there, I'm not about to feel grateful for that which is
inherently and obviously required..

We can now sync

Entourage to iCal/Address book, and subsequently, our wide array of Mac
Friendly handhelds (of which there are few, but hey iPod and Blackberry
are good enough for me)

2 things to consider.
First, the programmers do what they are paid/told to do.
Second, The Business Unit does what is requested and deemed potentially
profitable. Macs are <10% of the market.

Mac Office (professional) $499.00 vs. Office 2003 Professional $499.00 *but*
no Database ala Access, no Infopath, no Publisher, less functional
components overall... So I'm not going to feel too benevolent about paying
more for a less....

Mac Office is probably less

than that. Mac Office users who connect to Exchange servers are
probably substantially less than that.

I have no idea why people would use (except Word and Powerpoint) Office for
Messaging/Calendaring unless they are using Exchange???

Therefore, we are not a money pit at which they will throw their
valuable resources. We are the third world of computing. We are the
unwanted step children... wait, wrong script.

A quote from http://www.microsoft.com/mac/macbu/default.aspx?pid=macbu

" The Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) at Microsoft is the largest, 100
percent, Mac-focused developer of Mac software outside of Apple itself.
We're dedicated to building the finest productivity software for the Mac
platform. Not just the best Microsoft software for the Mac. The best
software for the Mac. We have a long-standing history of collaboration with
Apple and a continuing commitment to research and development. "

Hmmm....

Be appreciative of what we have, find work arounds, and use them. I
have an office of 60 operating very VERY heavily on Macs, Entourage,
and Exchange. It works. Better today than last year. It's not outlook,
but it shows marked improvement with EVERY release.

I'm in a company with a few thousand Macs and a few 10's of thousands of PC
users, all trying to interoperate/communicate over MS Exchange.. In medium
to large sized enterprises we don't feel too "appreciative" of having
critical business tools hobbled from the get go...

 

[Andy Ruff]

Philip, perhaps your organization should look at the Auto-Accept agent, a
Microsoft-supported solution that provides a good alternative to resource
booking. Many organizations with substantial numbers of Macs have chosen to
deploy it. The Exchange team's weblog provides a good comparison of the
agent with Outlook's resource booking support:

http://blogs.msdn.com/exchange/archive/2006/02/22/420275.aspx

As for the feature requests, we get a lot of them and with our finite number
of resources to try and address them in prioritized order based on a wide
customer base (Exchange users, home users, small business users, etc.) with
varying types of needs. SP2 was primarily focused at delivering a set of
enhancements aimed at Exchange users, leaving our customers without Exchange
(a large number of our users) with little more than a series of bug fixes.
11.2.3 aimed to provide new features that ALL of our users might find value
in.

It's the very same kind of decisions your company's engineering teams have
to make each day as they decide what direction to take their products in the
future. The answers aren't typically straight-forward, easy, or satisfying
to each and every customer.

Keep in mind that just a year ago you couldn't even share your calendar in
Entourage with other Exchange users. Sure, we've got a ways to go, but the
MacBU is doing our best to improve things for all our customers.

-Andy

--
Andy Ruff
MacBU Program Management
Entourage Weblog: http://blogs.msdn.com/entourage/

This posting is provided ³AS IS² with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I have no idea why people would use (except Word and Powerpoint) Office for
Messaging/Calendaring unless they are using Exchange???

I much prefer having the address book, calendar, and email all in the same
program.

I prefer to have newsreading in the same program as my email.

Entourage uses my AutoCorrect entries from Word.

It *would* be very interesting to know how many non-exchange, non-news users
there are, e.g., how many regular home/school users chose entourage over
Mail et al, without the lure of news or exchange. This newsgroup is skewed,
I think, as Exchange simply generates a lot of questions, which often show
up here.

However, even by your lights--if the only people using Entourage are
Exchange users, then that simply means even fewer development resources will
be dedicated to Entourage, pitting the "keep the corporate exchange users
happy" budget against the "keep the much larger number of non-corporate
users who use Word, Excel and Powerpoint happy" budget in the fight for
resources within the MacBU.

Daiya

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

However, even by your lights--if the only people using Entourage are
Exchange users,

which of course is complete nonsense. Entourage existed for 4 years through
two major versions without any Exchange features, and then another 2 years
with limited Exchange features into another major version. During that
period, 100% of Entourage users were non-Exchange users. They must still
form a substantial proportion of Entourage users - I would venture a very
healthy majority. Don't forget that MacBU stepped into the breach when
Outlook Mac folded on OS X. In Classic, Outlook 2001 Mac was free. That's
because the enterprise companies who constitute the huge mass of Microsoft
Office user do so mostly on Windows. No matter how few Macs they might have,
Microsoft wants and needs to keep these companies happy due to the enormous
numbers of Windows OS's and Windows Office they run. Even if the Exchange
fraction of Entourage users actually _cost_ Microsoft money, they'd still do
it to make the enterprise companies more or less happy. (That's precisely
what they did with Outlook Mac - no direct income on the Mac side at all.)
So they cannot afford to neglect their many non-Exchange customers.

then that simply means even fewer development resources will
be dedicated to Entourage, pitting the "keep the corporate exchange users
happy" budget against the "keep the much larger number of non-corporate
users who use Word, Excel and Powerpoint happy" budget in the fight for
resources within the MacBU.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.