Office:mac 2008 – AVOID, AVOID, AVOID

Nutshell = Bad. I made the mistake of running out and getting Office:mac 2008 on the hope that Entourage would finally work with Exchange. First, you are plagued with “Comparability Mode” that makes the suite terrible on a PC. Now it is also terrible on a Mac. Second, Entourage immediately tried to import my email and corrupted the email “database.” I have over 75,000 emails from 2 years archived in the Entourage “database” format – corrupted. Lovely.

9 hours later and numerous attempts at trying to restore my archive (while doing other things, of course, as each attempt takes ~1 hour), I am severely frustrated. How can Microsoft release a product that corrupts your email? To make matters worse, the interface does not match any other Microsoft email program in a classic Microsoft manner, so I can not even connect to Exchange, the whole purpose for this foolish exercise in the first place. This is another loser product by a company losing its edge.

PS: The boot time is disturbingly long, and it just crashed for the second time.

Update 1 – Connects in the same old way: Around 2:00 AM PST, I realized that the Entourage manual Exchange configuration interface for the 2008 version has the same unusual twists and turns as its 2004 counterpart. So, by following the exact same configuration as 2004, I was able to get Office:mac 2008 to connect to my Exchange server.

Update 2 – Sent emails still don’t appear on my Backberry: To my dismay, the connection of Entourage 2008 does not appear to be a fully capable Exchange protocol, like the PC counterpart, so my Sent Mail still does not synchronize with the Blackberry Enterprise Service. As a result, no sent mail through Entourage appears on my Blackberry device. This is was my number one complain with the 2004 version, shared by many of my friends and associates.

Update 3 – Text formatting is as bad as before: Despite reading about all of the formatting “bells and whistles” of Office:mac 2008, they apparently forgot to add these to Entourage. When I used a PC, I was able to send charts, graphs, and tables easily in Outlook. Not so with Entourage. Even using basic bulleted lists is a crapshoot. The formatting, as far as I can see, is the exact same in Entourage 2008 a in 2004.

Update 4 – Hey, my computer froze: At 8:30 AM PST, I hoped on the Mac to check out my download progress from the Exchange server. Low and behold, the brand new Mac Book Pro 17″ machine was frozen. Lovely. Reboot.

Update 5 – Load already, load – Type already, type: Well, the slow loading of Entourage 2008 continues after the reboot. I am now perusing email on my Lenovo X61 Tablet. I pound out a couple test emails on the new Entourage 2008, and the typing is actually slow in the email composition window… This is right after a reboot and the first application loaded.

Update 6 – Cool and strange: Andy Ruff, Lead Program Manager for Entourage at Microsoft, contacts me through the blog. I will approve the post. In response, I have updated the post with my concerns for him to see. I will be very impressed if he calls me.