Back to Entourage
November 26th, 2007After years of using OS X’s built-in Mail client, I’ve now switched back to using Entourage at work. And I’ve done this rather begrudgingly. It’s the end of a rather long saga of my trying to find a calendaring solution that works for me.
For quite a while, I used 30 Boxes. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a lot like Google Calendar except the dominant way you enter events is through a single input box. Google Calendar has something like this now and they call it “Quick Add”. This allowed you to put in an event like “Meeting with Sean 2pm 12/3 tag work” and it would add the event at the correct date and time and color code it whatever you might have defined for work. 30 Boxes also allowed you to tie into all of your other online information such as your accounts for MySpace, WordPress, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and more. You could also tie it into RSS feeds, iCalendars and such. When used to it’s fullest, 30 Boxes gave you a view into your own history across the web, as well as the activities of your friends who also had 30 Boxes accounts. Best of all, you could publish out tagged items from your calendar to wherever you like and style the data as you saw fit. For a while, I had a list of upcoming Chicago concerts in the sidebar pulled from 30 Boxes, which were just events tagged as “concert”. I also synced (one way unfortunately) all of my 30 Boxes calendars down to iCal on the Mac to have a local version of my events. That way I could pull my calendars into my phone, iPod or whatever.
The thing that stunk about 30 Boxes is how it handled meeting requests. You could add folks to one of your events and they’d get an e-mail asking them if they plan to attend, but it didn’t automatically show up in their calendar or anything that folks expected from a business calendaring system. So I had to bid farewell to 30 Boxes.
From there I switched to Google Calendar because I heard of an application called Spanning Sync that would allow two way synchronization between that and iCal. However, my first sync went disastrously and I quickly switched to exclusively using iCal.
I loved using iCal and used .Mac to sync my calendars between my home and work computers. But this too was doomed to failure, since Outlook 2003 (which most of my clients use) cannot properly read an invitation sent from iCal/Mail. Folks would get goofy results, be unable to respond to the meeting request, etc. Basically it was a hassle for everyone except me. Not the sign of a good solution.
So I’ve switched back to Entourage. And for the life of me, I can’t remember why I stopped using it in the first place. True, it’s slightly less elegant than OS X Mail. And it’s certainly less elegant than iCal. However, there are a great number of things that it does better in a business environment, and other than tracking concerts, keeping track of meetings at work is the most important thing I use a calendar for.
It’s not all bad news though – thanks to sync services in Entourage all my calendars and contacts are synced to iCal and Address Book in OS X, which means they’re also synced to my iPhone via iTunes and my home machine via .Mac. That’s a lot of applications working in tandem to get my calendars everywhere I need them, but so far so good.