Entourage for Apple Mac Laptops

I spent the better part of today exploring Entourage for Apple Mac laptops.

Currently, I use the trio Apple Mail, iCal, and Address Book for Mac. They all play very nice together. But what I am missing is a project management application and Entourage offers this.

Before I go on, let me say that I have tried OmniFocus for both my notebook and my iPod Touch. I have also given Bento a whirl on my computer. But what I really want is a native application that pulls it all together and also syncs with the iPhone or Touch. I know, what will I ask for next – an iMac that actually completes the project as well?

The bottom line is that Entourage looked promising. I recently purchased the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac suite but never looked beyond Word and Excel. But now I faced the problem of having all my data sitting in the native Apple applications and me not willing to commit to switching before putting Microsoft through the paces.

Luckily, I discovered the option called Sync Services in the preferences menu. Using Sync Services, I could set Entourage to sync with address book and mobileme, ical and mobile me, and the Entourage notes could be set to sync with mobileme. I can even set one program’s data to override the other’s. Or set the sync preferences to combine the data. Perfect – now I could make changes in one application and they would automatically be reflected in the other. Problem solved! Or so I thought.

Ah what a tangled web we weave. My contacts synced just fine but not the groupings that I had set up in Address Book.

And my calendar was a different story. You see, Apple’s iCal supports multiple calendars – so I have a calendar set up for each family member plus a few other odd calendars for daily menus, soccer schedules and the like. But Entourage only supports one calendar and has multiple categories. In Entourage, I would have a main calendar and each event would be assigned a category – in my case each category would bear the name of each family member. And, you guessed it – iCal does not support categories.

When I set up Sync Services to sync my calendars what it basically did was create a new calendar in iCal called, oddly enough, “Entourage”. Anything that I enter on this calendar will sync with Microsoft Office on my Apple Mac laptops.

Lovely. (dripping with sarcasm)

So where does this leave me? I probably will leave the project management behind and continue on with the native Mac applications. Or I may use some convoluted combination of Microsoft Office, iCal, and Address Book. The problem with any productivity system is that if it becomes too complicated – well, I just don’t use it regularly enough to be effective.

And what about syncing with Mobile devices. I will explore this issue in a future post. But I have had enough frustration and learning for one day!