Entourage developer seeks feeback
In the comments to the “Apple Mail vs Entourage with Exchange Server” post, Andy writes:
Hey, I work on
Entourage atMicrosoft … I realize that parts of the app feel dated and slow at times. But what would really help us is recommendations from you and other users about how we could make the app look better.Just post, I’ll read and share with the team!
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January 18th, 2006 at 12:11 am
I have used both Mail and Entourage extensively, and I honestly like the Entourage interface reasonably well. I use IMAP, and one of the most frustrating things is the inability to SEARCH through all folders. (I have to select the specific folder I want to search, one at a time.)
Other than integration with iCal and Spotlight, I really don’t have any specific requests. A “Tagging” ability, to assign tags to each mail would be nice.
January 18th, 2006 at 12:52 am
Hi Tim– here’s a heads-up: my next article on my switch from Entourage to the Apple apps (Mail, Address Book, and iCal) will be up at Low End Mac later this week. This time I’ll talk about Address Book.
I thought you– and the Entourage folks– would be interested.
January 18th, 2006 at 5:37 am
Full support for the vCard standard — both outlook and entourage don’t have the most updated version.
Full support for the icalendar format — or else you will lose market share to mozilla builds as they progress with sunbird and integrating into thunderbird.
The interface is dated, and typical design of MS — there are high end design professionals out there, just call us.
Improved stability with exchange servers — at the moment, we see Entourage as the only option we have to integrate with our outlook buddies. Since outlook is stuck with the exchange server, also on dated vcard and ical open source support, this is the route we’ve had to progress. Entourage is instable in the exchange environment.
Overall IMAP support is also very slow, as you’ve noted — but so is Mall.app at this moment. You have an opportunity to take over that market, I am surprised MS is so slow to act… not from your history, but from a business advantage.
I noticed that Entourage is taking more questions from users — you guys were talking with Kerio at Macworld and asking for their exchange feedback as well. Speed performance, support for better OS integration via standards, support for exchange server, UI overhaul is the general concensus. You’ve done an ok job getting away from the tired look of your PC sister, but it’s still no where near high end development. It could be great, though - look at other more unified UI’s and compare to what you’re lacking? A good example is ‘Daylite’ — their vesion 3 is a huge step from what they were once doing. It still has flaws, but it is a strong UI. Even RoundCube’s web based app, with it’s thunderbird icons, has a more interactive UI.
MS is not known for it’s design, but you can change that.
January 18th, 2006 at 7:19 am
Some random thoughts on Entourage:
Of course, Address Book support would be nice!
Font rendering: What is it with Entourage 11 and antialiasing 10pt Monaco?? Stop that! (Entourage 10 didn’t!) Also I sometimes wonder if there’s some special effort to make (some) non-Microsoft fonts inside Microsoft apps look bad.
Column width in ?Ǭªclassic?Ǭ´ three pane view: As nice as the newish Outlook three columns view might be, it’s not really suitable for a 1024×768 screen resolution (iBooks, small PowerBooks etc.). Ok, so there’s the classic three pane view with preview window below the message list. It’s fine, it works. The problem is with the column widths in the message list in this view: Though it may in some cases be nice to be able to set them for each folder, I find it plain annoying in normal use! Come on, you people really forgot the possibility of a (changeable) system/account wide preset for column types and widths??! I actually want all columns in (almost) all folder to have *exactly* the same width!
January 19th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Two reasons:
1) Searching. I can find any word within 4 years of mail messages almost instantly with Mail.app. In my opinion, this is a huge advantage that I have over the rest of my Entourage-using officemates.
2) No support for the iCalendar standard (let me subscribe to iCalendar feeds!)
January 20th, 2006 at 4:08 am
Hey everyone, thanks for the feedback! I’ll pass along what I’ve seen to the team. A few responses:
Searching/Spotlight - we’ll have full Spotlight support with a free update in March. We’ll aslo have Sync Services support. We realize the search is painfully slow in Entourage and see Spotlight as an ideal way of solving the problem while also opening Entourage up to whatever future Spotlight holds. It took us some time to do this and I’ll explain that sometime on my own blog.
IMAP Searches (Kitty A) - if you’ve got an IMAP account configured, you can do more sophisticated IMAP searches by using the IMAP search tool under the Edit menu. Admittedly, it’s very hidden and not easy to use.
iCalendar/vCard support (Brady) - I’d love to hear what shortcomings you’re finding. Just send an e-mail along to me.
iCalendar (Scott) - we support the format, but not iCal’s subscription feature (which is a cool app feature, not part of the format). We did add support for multi-event iCalendar files in SP2. You can’t subscribe to them, but if you download one of the Mozilla/KDE events on iCalShare, you should now get all of the events saved on your primary Entourage calendar. Admittedly, Apple’s iCal handles this much more gracefully.
Address Book support (Christian) - will be there in March :).
I’ll be sending a link to this post around to the team. There are a lot of good recommendations here and, while I can’t promise anything, it certainly helps us take a look at what direction we need to go. We’ve done a lot with Exchange support, Sync Services, and Spotlight in the last year… but we’ve got a long way to go.
BTW, Tim… I read this blog because it’s an excellent source for understanding what people enjoy about Mail.app and, more generally, mail clients on their Mac. I figure that a good share of your readers tried and turned away from Entourage. I’m always interested in knowing what went wrong and how we can make that better. I’m not here to get people to switch. Mail clients are like cars, we’ve all got our own set of styles and features that we feel comfortable with. Thanks for helping facilitate the conversation.
January 20th, 2006 at 9:45 am
I’ll email you some vcards that won’t load properly, no problem. As for the iCalendar, I was almost certain you’ve left some of the standard formats out of there in entourage (though that maybe my bias towards outlook).
Quick notations:
Smart Folders — the technology is useful.
Group management — similar to threading. However, with threading in mail I can have subjects group, but still organize by date received or name, or subject… etc.
Again, the UI, it’s almost a reason I don’t want to use it. More customization if need be — love it if there were themes like thunderbird, but I’m sure that won’t happen. Either way, it’s a bit eye sore right now. For example, going to address book, clicking on a card — that gradient for the header?! Rough. Icons, rough, footer with the repeat pattern at the bottom of the address that matches the gradient, also bad. I’ll second the typography complaints, but I know your companies history with, cough, Arial, so we’ll let that one slide:)
The ability to edit contacts right into the bottom right preview pane (admitedly a rip off of Address Books functionality), would be useful rather than an extra pop up window, and save the user some time.
That all I can think of, I’ll continue to look.
For my own personal interest, as a Creative Director — some of the errors in the look and feel are not typical of many design shops — I would argue that they wouldn’t pass approval in many places. Why do you think this is Andy? Microsoft is a huge company, but they’ve always been lackluster in the design arena — is it because management is driving the design and not allowing the experienced designers too? You must have the potential and the resources to get the best and the brightest, but I don’t see that coming out — which natuarlly makes me assume that you have management without design knowledge (or second hand design experience) guiding this, without the designers intervention. Is this the case or am is it something else I’m unaware of?
Thanks for the return response so far:) We appreciate the open forum, and the opportunity to talk with you. MS does not always have the reputation of an open forum company, though I’ve been vocal before.
January 20th, 2006 at 10:02 am
I see you have MSN Messenger support in there, understandable - but support for iChat would be nice as well. We can argue that both AOL and MSN are proprietary formats — but for large businesses (some of my clients to name a few) who do their own in house instant messaging off jabber servers, will not use MSN or AOL because of the security risks. MSN does not support jabber (atleast, from what I see, unless I’m wrong?), iChat does — it would be a great help.
January 21st, 2006 at 1:55 pm
Two sort of odd things that I’ve noticed.
1. Where’s the button in the calendar?
2. Where’s the insert link button when you’re composing an email? I hate copying a 3 line http:// address into an email that I know probably won’t get there in one piece. It’s ugly and adds clutter. I’d rather just make it a link.
Thanks for the chance to share a thought. Looking forward to the iSync feature.
February 2nd, 2006 at 5:19 pm
I am trying Entourage for the first time… My original PIM, Chronos Personal organizer, will not be updated, and the replacement in the form of SoHo hardly deserves any attention. I considered many alternatives, among which DayLite stands out?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùas the most powerful app, very nice, but expensive and sales-orientated. I don’t have a business, and I have a license 4 Entourage via my job.
Second, my email client is PowerMail, because of its speed and especially its customizable, incredibly fast searching. But PM is weak in IMAP and Unicode; I need both. The developers do not seem to be interested in either. Mail is slow, not always reliable (upgrades have corrupted some of my data before). Searching is not as fast or thorough as PowerMail (although I love the smart folders).
So: I need a fast and reliable IMAP email client linked to a project center. Apart from the hideous design?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùwhich may be an obstacle?¢‚Ǩ‚ÄùEntourage seems to do a lot of things which may save me time, eventually. It did choke on email import the first times I ran it, but I’ll give it a serious try.
Wishlist:
iCal / AB integration (2-ways) with calendar subscription (I refuse to enter the holidays myself; if Entourage cannot subscribe to calendars, I’m off)
PDA syncing
easier customization of searching (now it is slow, a kind of personal preferences saveable as tabs would be faster; or something like http://www.tumultco.com/blog/?p=43 for example)
February 3rd, 2006 at 8:28 am
I would like the task list next to the calendar view to be more custo,mizable; for example, selecting those tasks due “this week” or “today”.
February 4th, 2006 at 6:01 am
Had been using DayLite and Mail for several months but recently returned to Entourage. Its endlessly flexible linking options and the 4-in-1 package was what brought me back. Stability in E2004 is now not really an issue. Have lost more messages in Mail. Hasn’t crashed with any consequences for years now.
Needs - in no particular order:
- Option of larger fonts for the Contact input window. Lord that tiny window and tiny font size is hard on aging eyes.
- Better search options for Contacts. Can only search on one field at a time. DayLite and AB at least give you the option of global searches within all fields.
- Is there no way you can give us a diffferent Contact window which, like Daylite 2/3, shows not only the demographics but also the linked data.
- Sort out the printing of Tasks and the Calendar. Literally unusable in its current format. Have to sync to iCal and print from there. Pathetic.
- Decent syncing with Address Book and iCal. No offence Paul (Berkowitz) but your scripts are slow +++. But at least they exist.
- Would love to have sub-tasks.
- Sort out the bugs with the Calendar input window and the unusable Link to New User window.
- Better way to report bugs. The current method(Help>Send feedback on Entourage) takes you to a MS page. Clicking on the report bugs links asks you to call a number in the US. Bit odd for us non-US folk.
- And yes a UI update.
February 5th, 2006 at 2:38 am
I recently changed from OSX Mail to Entourage because of the calendar interface. I had previously resorted to GroupCal by Snerdware to synch iCal with the Exchange server. Entourage calendar support is definitely an improvement. I like to have frequent calendar and mail updates while working, but Entourage freezes for a moment with each synching call, frustrating when trying to respond to email. I’d rather not decrease the synch frequency. I wish there were a way that Entourage could synch in the background (I am an IMAP user) without interfering with ongoing email.
Another little annoyance: Entourage does not allow much user flexibility in setting the default font style for outgoing/incoming messages etc. Appears to be limited to font name and size without global default settings for color and style as in other mail programs.
Having someone on the MS Entourage team acknowledge that they are listening to the commentary gives one a warm glow.
February 5th, 2006 at 5:31 am
Here’s another quirk for you. When a reminder for an even pops up, it tells me how many hours/minutes away it is. Not helpful. I don’t want to look at a clock and go, “What time will it be 4h38m from now?” I can’t find any reference to being able to toggle that option to just display the event time. Would be nice. Again, glad someone is reading these. I have also tried to submit feedback through the MS link and was direct to a generic page that gave me the distinct impression that my feedback wasn’t wanted.
February 27th, 2006 at 12:02 am
1. make it like Datebook 5 and Agendus on Palm - use the same database so that i can use addressbook, ical, entourage at will. OR make the Project Manager drag and drop to and from address book, Mail and iCAl or LifeBalance( or any other PIM, software)
I want to be able to use any of the above programs and they all stay current to my changes. Is that the SYNC you mean that comes in March ? I can open address book or Entourage or my Palm and schedule and plan to my heart’s content. Press iSync and viola, all is synched ! Notes, attachments and links,
2.SUB tasks ! make something akin to Life Balance where I can setup a Project for myself that is task and level prioritzed. Or how about this - Make Entourage able to read a LifeBalance file, a Daylite file, a Crm4 file or a Merlin file. My vote is Life Balance for us ADHDers
3. make a grid for tasks - important/urgent, important.not urgent, not importnat,urgent, not importnat/not urgent. Allow user to determine how the task list is displayed by priority or by grid, or by project
4.make entourae able to use use Agendus pro(palm os) info - subtasks, locations for meetings, colors of projects sync to Palm
5. allow me to sync to .mac so that I can have same info avaible wether I’m on my laptop user 1 or my laptop user 2 or my home desktop, or my office desktop.
March 5th, 2006 at 8:45 am
Thanks, Andy, for requesting feedback. I think the Mac Office team would get a fair number of good suggestions, along with a disproportionate amount of carping to be sure, if they returned the “feedback” option to the Help menu. Don’t make me use the news groups. They are a mess, despite the amazing MSVPs, like Paul Berkowitz, that reside there.
Like a number of users have already indicated: Entourage’s UI is a mess. I should be able to better manage my own screen real estate needs and priorities — like the customizability of things in Word. If need be, go with a toolbar model that allows users to create a toolbar that features their most-used features. This varies from user to user, so it’s really helpful to have this flexibility — but please, please, PLEASE do not repeat Word’s mistake of doing all of this through templates. The ongoing fiasco which is Word’s Normal template, on both the PC and Mac platforms, is testimony to the fact that a lot of people will use something substantially broken because of the 65% of the time it works it works really well.
I won’t repeat the UI requests above that I think are really, really good — like direct editing of Address Book info in the pane as opposed to having to open a freaking dialogue box to do it — but I will add that having the 3-pane option across ALL functions of Entourage seems like an obvious “oops!” on the Mac Office team’s part. I can “preview” Mail and Addresses but not Notes and Tasks? That’s just dumb and it limits my use, unnecessarily, of Entourage.
Speaking of dumb, why can’t Entourage use the same navigation keyboard short cuts as the rest of the Mac platform — or why can’t I change this behavior like I can in Word? CMD + -> should take me to the end of the line and not one word to the right, which is the same behavior as OPT + ->. CTRL + -> should take me to the next sentence.
In general, I don’t have the same kind of complaints about searching in Entourage, but I think that I’ve come to regard that particular functionality as so maddening that I’ve learned to avoid it. It really boggles my imagination that I have to turn to the “Find” function on the EDIT menu which then recreates the main viewing window, confusing the user as to exactly where he or she is.
I say all this as a long-time Entourage user who has consistently flirted or considered switching over the Apple suite but finds two problems with the suite:
1. I know that separate, small applications is the unix way, but I don’t want that many apps sitting in my dock or being cycled through the app-switching bezel.
2. I also don’t like that those separate, small applications store their information in diverse locations not of my choosing. If I could have set their default directories to within the ~/Documents directory that I keep synced on my three computers using my iPod, I would probably have considered moving by now.
So, given that I have and use my iPod, getting sync services up and running would get a “huzzah!” out of me. (Along with a “what took you so long?”)
Finally, could you give SOHO users some way to share calendars and address books? Really, it’s time. While I can see the business value proposition of making Exchange a necessary “upgrade” for SOHOs, it’s not realistic. Exchange servers require the kinds of professionals that SOHOs, like my home and like the research center I help direct, are just never going to get. Make it basic if you must, but make it happen.
March 15th, 2006 at 9:03 am
[...] The update features improvements to all the Office apps, but Entourage gets some features that users have long been asking for. (Remember the Entourage developer who posted here in January looking for user feedback and feature suggestions?) [...]
March 16th, 2006 at 6:05 am
Linking Features:
Drag and Drop linking would be a HUGE time saver.
Also the “link to existing” feature takes too much time to find the item i want to link to - a search field would be enormously helpful there.
May 7th, 2006 at 8:31 am
I was compiling my own Pet Peeves list when I came across this thread. Here are some things that have been bugging me for several rev’s about Entourage:
1) Exports:
a) Cannot export address selected records; must export all records.
b) Cannot export address category information.
c) Cannot export business/home preference
2) Cannot find and replace; only allow finds;
3) No search or column ability for Instant Message fields; they do no show up in an list of search fields or column options (they do show up in an export)
4) Notes & Tasks:
a)Notes and Tasks should have preview panes like Messages and Addresses; inconsistent interface design
b)) Why can’t Notes or Tasks be put in folders like e-mail messages?
5) Project is very limited when it comes to smart filtering.
6) Instant Messaging should support other clients (AIM, etc.)
7) Filtering: In the Mail window, filtering only allows you to filter by from, to, subject, project which doesn’t work terribly well. The “from†filter doesn’t get domain names in e-mail addresses, which makes it hard to search everyone with the same domain.
–
8) Searching: incredibly slow. Work needs to be done on the search engine.
June 21st, 2006 at 4:45 pm
I’d like to see better capabilities with respect to its use in an office environment.
An easy way to create an updated company address list and send it out to all the users would be great. I know there are public folders on the exchange server but they seem buried.
Better integration w/ Outlook which has to be run on our Windows machines.
Better ability to delegate access to another person.
Calenders with a view that they are to be shared and crossed w/ others to immeadiately find conflicts in schedules (for instance when scheduling meetings).
Continual problems seem to exist w/ the sync feature which eats up performance and disables Entourage all together at times.
Those would be my suggestions, all with an eye as to how it’s used in a business environ. Syncing PDAs to Exchange has worked very well. Calender is useful but w/ the above suggestions it’d benefit groups (which is what Office is supposed to be about, I think). Besides that, not too many complaints, I too would switch to .Mail if they took this business environment approach to their app (or as a separate package acknowledging a growing business presence….LISTENING APPLE?).
December 6th, 2006 at 4:46 am
I would definitely like to see better support with exchange server.
I have over 75 user using this application to read there email, and all complain that it takes them as long as 5 minutes to read one email because entourage is so slow, and sits there with the spinning beach ball.
In general build it just like you built outlook, to work and not cause problems.
January 21st, 2007 at 2:36 am
I just switched to Entourage from Mail, on an IMAP setup, and overall, it is not bad, except for the real big pain, which in my view is that if there even is a way to select text in a message & insert a link to make the text the link, I can’t find it by searching the help file.
If this is a feature that is not included, I will probably go back to Mail, because that would be an omission that is unacceptable in my view, and why in the world would that not be possible?? It must be there, & I just am a frustrated newbie.
If there is a way to do this, could someone enlighten me?? I found this site by Google searching for ” how do you insert a link in Entourage?”.
January 21st, 2007 at 7:48 am
Doug, I’m not really the right person to be offering advice on Entourage. Hopefully, someone else will come by and see this.
Have you thought of asking in the Usenet news group — microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage
Or hunting around on the unofficial Entourage Support page - http://www.entourage.mvps.org/index.html ?
January 21st, 2007 at 9:54 am
Doug, looks bad. I found this in the Usenet group mentioned above:
Note also:
January 21st, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Thanks Tim, looks like I have the answer and a workaround…
Cheers!
February 27th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Support for HTML signatures, please! It’s too complicated and time consuming.
June 6th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Ok, I’m going to keep it short and simple.
Please create subtask support in Entourage, in a similar fashion to Franklin Covey’s PlanPlus software (PC) has implemented. Unfortunately, since PlanPlus does not have OS X support, I’m stuck with just placing the subtasks for each task in the notes section of each task..
Looking forward to the updates,
Mark