I don’t normally cover Entourage plugins on Hawk Wings, but a developer flattered me enormously today by sending me a press release as if Hawk Wings were “a real player”, so here’s his plugin. It’s actually quite good, all flattery aside.

EntourageABMenu is a Menubar utility for Entourage that gives you easy access to your contacts system-wide, the same thing as iAddressX does for Address Book and Mail.app.

If you are interested in Entourage (UPDATE: or if you use Mail.app with an Exchange server—see after the jump), you can find screenshots and a brief review after the jump.

EntourageABMenu sits in the Menubar and offers easy access to the content of your Entourage address book by alphabetically, by group or company:

Selecting a menu item will trigger an action such as displaying the content in large type, copying it to the clipboard, creating a new email, dialing the phone (accomplished by running a customizable AppleScript), or showing an address on a map using the Google Maps service.

It has a rich set of tweakable preferences, including the ability to use either your local contacts or contacts stored on an Exchange server:

It also features a hotkey-launchable “Quick Lookup” window, which can search either your local contacts on an Exchange server’s Global Address List:

All-in-all, it seems like a clever little app. If I could conquer my bigotry and bring myself to use Entourage, I’m sure this would be in my toolkit.

UPDATE: Jonathan, the app’s developer, emails to suggest another use for EntourageABMenu:

EntourageABMenu could be used with Mail & Entourage at the same time. Say someone had an Exchange account where they kept their address book but still used Mail for email. If Mail is set as the default email client, then EntourageABMenu could retrieve the contact data from the user’s Exchange account (through Entourage) but new emails created with that data in EntourageABMenu would be created in Mail (or whatever application is set as the default email client).

A new version (1.3) released today adds several important improvements. The contact data cache is now persistent which makes subsequent launches significantly faster and you can now select a group to email all at once,. There is improved support of contact names with diacritical characters (accent marks) and an error has been fixed which caused the default postal address to not be listed first in some instances.

EntourageABMenu is shareware (USD 10). The unregistered version is fully functional but limited to 30 minute sessions. You can download it and/or read a much longer description of the app’s features on the developer’s web site .entourage, contacts, address book, menubar access, quick search, Microsoft, not bad for an Entourage plugin

Similar Posts:

• JABMenu: Menubar Address Book
• EntourageABMenu: Update, special offer
• JABMenu 1.1: Faster, more options
• AddressX: Exchange contacts in Address Book
• Ten steps to a smarter Address Book

Tags: Address Book, contacts, entourage, menubar access, microsoft, not bad for an Entourage plugin, quick search

This entry was posted on Thursday, 6th April, 2006 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Email in general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.