Tom Negrino at MacWorldhas written a review of Entourage 2008, part of the newly released Microsoft Office for Mac 2008.

Although it has its fans, the shortcomings of Entourage 2004 were well-known and many were hoping for greater things from Entourage 2008.

MacWorld’s verdict?

There are several other new or improved features relating to e-mail or calendaring, but they apply only to users in corporate environments that connect to a Microsoft Exchange server. Given that it’s been four long years in the making, it’s a missed opportunity that Entourage 2008 hasn’t also added some of the best new features found in Mail, such as automatic detection of physical addresses and dates, or e-mail stationery templates.

Entourage gets points for more complete AppleScript-ability, for compatibility with Mac OS X’s Services and for looking nicer, but when you get down to business — backing up your email and working with other apps — things look less rosy.

Negrino notes Microsoft’s advice that Entourage’s monolithic database be excluded from Time Machine backups and that users employ “alternative backup methods” instead. This is not only a pain in the butt, but cuts across the comprehensive design of Time Machine as a “set and forget”, everything-that-matters-to-you backup system.

Working with iCal is also fraught in Negrino’s view:

When you first synchronize Entourage with Sync Services, it creates an Entourage calendar in iCal, replicating your Entourage events in iCal. If you add or change events in that Entourage calendar in iCal or on a mobile device, those events will be synchronized back to Entourage’s internal calendar. But there’s no way to bring events from other iCal calendars (such as the default Home, Work, or Birthdays calendars) into Entourage’s internal calendar. Put another way, Entourage can publish data to iCal, but can’t subscribe to any of iCal’s other calendars. In effect, Entourage uses iCal as a convenient conduit to synchronize its data to other devices, but doesn’t treat iCal as a full calendaring partner.

After getting to the end of the review, I was surprised by the final sentence:

“Finally, if you’re outside of the corporate realm, and need a mail, calendar, and contact manager with lots of headroom and solid integration with the rest of the Office suite, Entourage provides a wealth of features that are deeper than Apple’s trio.”

Are you? entourage, microsoft, office for mac 2008, mail.app, ical, address book, sync services, time machine, email

You have to feel sorry for people in Charles Dale’s position.

For almost a week now he has been emailing me with news of outages in his .Mac service.

At first, I felt sorry for him but was sure that the problems would soon be rectified. After all, while .Mac doesn’t guarrantee access to your email (see the .Mac Terms and Conditions ), it is a premium service that markets itself with the promise that “you will always have access to your email”.

But, in fact, the problems persisted. Look at the outages he’s suffered:

These interruptions are only affecting “some” members, although the threads on Apple’s Discussion Board suggest that it’s rather more than a handful.

And users must be a little nervous about having their service restored. “Some” have found that all their email was deleted after the most recent outage.

I guess it is a very complicated system. I can’t think of any other reason for these ongoing outages or why “some” users were unable to use .Mac’s sync services for 51 hours (as reported in the Network Status section of the .Mac home page).

UPDATE: Darren has also been saving screenshots, and sent in some which show a longer history:

By way of comparison, there was an outage at Fastmail on 26 May:

Outage for 30 minutes for some users

One of our new frontend replicated servers crashed, but didn’t give up its IP to the other server. This meant that 50% of users (depending randomly on which IP you had been given) would have had trouble connecting to web, IMAP, POP and SMTP for the last 30 mins.

We’re trying to find out why the automatic failover didn’t kick in, and also update our warning systems so that we’re paged faster if a problem like this with the new replicated servers occurs again.

Within 10 minutes the news was posted on the service’s RSS feed, explaining what was going on, how it is being fixed and what steps are underway to improve the service. If you have to have an outage, that’s the way to have one.dotmac, .mac, outages, sync services, apple, email, mail.app, apple mail