Breaking the Entourage Habbit

OK, I finally decided it is time to leave the world of Entourage behind. I happen to like a SINGLE application that does address book, email, and calendar, and it syncs very nicely to my Treo, but I do NOT like that Entourage creates one VERY LARGE file to keep all the data in. Why do I care? Well, reading or deleting just one email causes the very large Microsoft Data file to change, meaning you backup everything every time. I keep almost all my old email, so my data file is over 2 GB. That means that EVERY day I have at least 2 GB to back up, and it causing havoc with Time Machine always running out of space. Apple mail, on the other hand, keeps every email as a separate file, meaning that only a small amount of data changes when you read email. That for me was a good reason to change.

Strangely, Entourage 2004 was a very solid incarnation of the program, seldom if ever crashed, and worked just fine. However, the 2008 version is incredibly slow, crashes often (more so on Intel Macs) and has dropped Sync for Palm as well.

So, I decided to migrate to Apple’s Mail program, which means I also have to use iCal and Address Book as well. Here is how it went:

1). Mail: Moving from Entourage mail to Apple mail was easy, even for someone like me who had thousands of saved emails. Apple Mail has Entourage import built right in, will show you all the mailboxes you have, and let you select which ones you want to import. It worked very well.

HOWEVER, it does not bring any attributes with it. ALL email moves into Apple mail marked as UNREAD, and that really sucks. Also, any FLAGS, info on replied to emails, important flags, or any other color flags you may have marked are lost. Too bad really, but I can live with it.

2). Calendar: The Calendar application also moved over fairly easily, and ALL Entourage events show up in Calendar as one category, labeled Entourage, and repeating events, and multi day events also imported correctly as well. Unfortunately, once again all attributes were lost, including color and category designation. But that too I was able to correct in 10 to 15 minutes, so not so bad.

3). Address Book: Unfortunately, this application failed miserably. Apple put excellent import functions into mail and calendar to allow Entourage data to be imported easily, but Address Book did not. It was almost like this application was written by a different team or company, as both iCal and Mail applications had a specific Entourage data import function built in, but Address Book, no such luck.

But, you can get those addresses into your address book just the same. Simply export your contacts from Entourage to a text file, and import that into Address Book. It does ask you one contact at a time what to do with the data, but I simply applied the default to all contacts, and it worked. However, a lot of data, like the Custom fields, are all left behind, and often the name do not transfer properly. It will take some hand editing to make this all correct.

The bottom line is that you can get all your data moved over, but it is not as simple as it should be, and it will require some editing and hand checking on your part to make it all work.

So now I get to see what life is like with one less Microsoft program. The only task left to do is see how to sync all this to my Palm Treo, but I do not expect that to be too much of a problem. I’ll let you know!