Entourage Weblog

Well, it looks like I’ve lost my excuse for not responding to e-mail…

Hello There! You guys should have read the earlier post by Andy Ruff mentioning that 'We're Back' and more people from our team will be blogging here. I am not exactly part of MacBU or Entourage product development group, but I work very closely with them. So who am I and what do I do for living?

Who am I?
My full name is M. Amir Haque and I go by Amir (pronounced as 'Aamer'). I joined Microsoft in Sep. of 2000 as a Support Engineer in PSS (Product Support Services). I have always been part of 'Microsoft Enterprise Messaging' support group, which provides Exchange support to big enterprises (like Fortune 1000 companies) and professional customers out there. I specialize in 'Exchange Client Connectivity' (Outlook & Entourage), Outlook Web Access, RPC over HTTP, and other Exchange Mobility-related features like Exchange ActiveSync (server-side). In my current job role as a 'Support Escalation Engineer', I focus on technical mentoring and support case escalations. I develop & present training to support engineers and provide product feedback to different development groups here at Microsoft. I also work closely with Entourage product group in Mac Business Unit at Microsoft and this has enabled me to beta test Entourage since it started talking to Exchange Server with 10.1.4 Update for Entourage X, released on Aug. 4th, 2003. I recently tested new features released in 11.2.3 Update for Entourage 2004 for Mac and plan to post some blogs about them over here. This is the first blog of that series.

What does this new feature provide?
With the new 11.2.3 Update installed, you can now use Apple’s Spotlight feature to execute searches against your Entourage database contents. Spotlight can find any item inside your Entourage database; it does not matter, where that item is. You can find any item related to any kind of mail account (POP, IMAP or Exchange) which is present in a folder inside your Entourage database. Folder type also does not matter, i.e. Spotlight can search all folders of any type related to any kind of mail account. As Entourage downloads a copy of each item in its local database, even when you use IMAP or Exchange mail account (which are only ‘mirrored’ locally in database, Entourage does not delete messages from the mailbox on server after downloading), thus using Spotlight you can execute searches against all of those items.

What are the basic requirements to use this new feature?
So what does one need to do to start using this feature? Nothing! Yes, nothing if you have already installed the 11.2.3 Update for Office 2004 for Mac from Mactopia on top of your Mac OS X (Mac OS 10.4 or higher is required, recommended is latest i.e. 10.4.5) system. You don’t need to configure anything; it just works right out of the box. We recommend waiting for some time if you have a huge database (in gigabytes), so that Spotlight can complete its indexing process for Entourage’s database. Otherwise, wait for just a few minutes and you will be all set to go!

Where are the preferences for this feature?
If you want to set preferences inside Entourage related to this feature, just go to Entourage : Preferences : General Preferences : Spotlight (screenshot)

You will see the following 2 options:

1. A check box saying 'Include Entourage items in Spotlight search results'

This box will be checked by default for the very first identity (if you have multiple identities) which you will use in Entourage after you install 11.2.3 Update. Checking this box makes the Entourage database available to Spotlight for indexing, which is needed for you to be able to search quickly thru items inside Entourage database. If you want to turn off this feature, just uncheck this box & items inside this identity won't show up in your Spotlight search.

2. A button labeled as 'Rebuild'

Pressing this button will remove and recreate the Entourage index that Spotlight uses. Depending on the size of the Entourage database, rebuilding can take some time. Rebuilding process starts as soon as you press this button (pressing ‘OK’ button at the bottom of that window is not required). It's recommended to rebuild your cache if you continue to see inconsistency between what you have in Entourage and what Spotlight finds for you.

Note: Pressing the 'Rebuild' button repeatedly is not recommended as each time you press this button, the Spotlight has to remove the previous Entourage items from its index and add the new items back into the index. If a user presses it too often, he’ll swamp both Entourage and Spotlight with indexing requests, causing both - an inconsistency in his Spotlight search results and a general performance hit to his computer.

How can I use this feature?
Let’s take this new feature for a test drive. Here is how I have set the Spotlight preferences (under 'System Preferences') on my Mac OS 10.4.5 system (iBook, PPC, G3, 600 MHz, 256 MB RAM, 14 GB HD). I am connecting to a mailbox on an Exchange Server out there on the Internet and have some data in my mailbox (~10 MB). I went to the top right hand corner of my Finder, clicked on that blue Spotlight search icon and typed 'test' in the search box. Voila! I got what I was looking for! This screenshot shows the types of items Spotlight was able to find which I have in my Entourage database. Notice that a ‘Note’ in Entourage shows up under ‘Documents’ category in Spotlight search & a ‘Task’ in Entourage is showing up under ‘Events & To Do’s’ category. Spotlight is just using the Apple terminology for these items. Here is another screenshot of the same search when I clicked on ‘Show All’, which lists ‘Top 5’ items in each category and provides a link to see more of them under each category.

Can I execute Spotlight searches from within Entourage?
At this time, you may not use the Spotlight search engine from within Entourage. In order to perform Spotlight-powered searches, you must use the OS provided tools, i.e. Spotlight Menu, Spotlight Window, Smart Folders, Command Line Tools or for developers, they can use MDQuery.

How does this feature work with multiple identities in Entourage?
Entourage does support the indexing of multiple identities for Spotlight feature. However, by default, the Entourage Spotlight indexing preference is only enabled in the first identity launched with Entourage updated with 11.2.3 Update. If you switch to another identity, the Spotlight preference will not be automatically enabled - you must enable it manually (Entourage : Preferences : General Preferences : Spotlight). Keep in mind that indexing multiple identities within the same Mac OS user account will result in each identity’s items appearing intermixed with other identities in the Spotlight search results. If you want to keep identities separated, it’s recommended that you create separate Mac OS user accounts and use ‘Fast User Switching’ (best method, provides data privacy/security) or you can use ‘Smart Folders’ in Mac OS.

Summary
This blog was intended to provide a general introduction of the new feature, later we will expand on different aspects of it. Let us know using comments if you have any questions or concerns. Thanks for listening!

- Amir

All of these features build upon some exciting technologies introduced in Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger). Since 10.4’s initial release, we’ve been working alongside Apple to insure that Entourage users could take advantage of all these features. These efforts were done alongside the development of SP2 (released earlier this year) and the next version of Mac Office (including Universal Binary support for Intel Macs).

Sync Services
Entourage is now a first-class sync client within the Mac OS. Your contacts may now show up within Apple’s Address Book, your events and tasks within iCal, and all Entourage information is available both for .Mac synchronization as well as iSync for quick access on your mobile devices. I’ve been synchronizing with my Sony Ericsson W800 (Tiger skinned) using Bluetooth and iSync since early in development.

Spotlight
I’ll be the first to admit that searching within in Entourage is slow. Painfully slow. However, Apple’s Spotlight is blazing fast. With this release, Entourage data is now available for indexing by Spotlight. Your mail messages, contacts, events, notes, and tasks are all possible results within Spotlight searches and the Finder’s Smart Folders.

We’ve also provided a large amount of metadata to Spotlight, so you can do useful things like create a Smart Folder that shows all Entourage items within a category (in the Finder, create a new Smart Folder, select “Keywords”, as the criteria, and enter the name of your category). There are a ton of possibilities here… I’ll try to explore some more of these within future blog posts.

Smart cards
Mac OS 10.4 supports smart cards for signing, decrypting, and encrypting e-mail messages through the Keychain. This update improves interoperability of Entourage with the Keychain such that smart card based Keychain entries are accessible by Entourage.

Stay Tuned...
With this release, I've now got a bit more time to post regularly. In addition to discussion of these new features, I've received many requests from blog readers on additional topics to cover. I plan to do so soon! There's also a strong possibility that additional members of the Entourage team may post some messages here. So, again, stay tuned...

- Andy Ruff

One of the most handy features within Entourage 2004 is the ability to check your company's e-mail from home, on your Mac, and without ever firing up a VPN connection to your office.  To configure Entourage to check e-mail from home, just do the following:

1. In Safari, log into your organization's Outlook Web Access website
2. In the Location field (where you type http://www... ), copy the address up to the first slash after the www portion of the text.  For example, if the web site's address began with http://www.example.com/exchange/john/, you would copy http:///www.example.com/.
3. In Entourage, open up your Exchange account's settings (Tools menu : Accounts menu item:), double-click Your Exchange Account Name , and paste the copied website address in the Server field.
4. To access public folders or see free/busy information from home, click the Public Folders link in Outlook Web Access and copy-paste the first part of the URL (e.g. http://www.example.com/public) into the Public Folder server field on your Exchange account's Advanced tab.

Once configured, you should now be able to read your mail from home without needing to VPN into your corporate network.  I do this all the time on my PowerBook and don't ever bother to change the setting while in my office.  Anywhere there's a wifi connection, I've got e-mail.

Geeky detail: Entourage relies on UDP notifications from the Exchange server to determine when new e-mail is available.  Typically, when connected through the above method, the UDP notifications are blocked from ever arriving.  To compensate, Entourage will ask the Exchange server once a minute for any new items within an Exchange mailbox.

(Or "Why You May Want to Patch Your Exchange Server")

Before SP2, Entourage would allow you to perform an action within a folder, calendar, or address book and, at a later time, the app would attempt to sync your change to the server. If the sync failed due to permission errors, the offending item would be either moved to your drafts without notice or, in some instances, completely lost--unquestionably a bad experience for anyone.

As we added a fair amount of features in SP2 to enable team collaboration (e.g. sharing calendars, opening shared folders, improved delegation, much improved public folder support), solving permission confusion became a much more critical issue. No one wants to spend 30 minutes crafting a post to a public folder only to have it disappear because they had read-only permissions on the folder and Entourage never let them know.

How Does Entourage Enforce Permissions?
Let’s start with a simple example of a common permission setting: a user with the ability to delete items they created in a folder but without the ability to delete items others created in the folder. In this case, the folder level permissions are Delete Own while each item’s deletion permission varies based on ownership.

Each folder and item on the server has a corresponding PR_ACCESS value that is calculated by the Exchange server. When certain folders and items are synchronized with Entourage, the application retrieves a corresponding PR_ACCESS along with all the other information about the folder, message, contact, or event. Entourage makes no attempt to calculate the user’s permission level from within the client; the server informs us of permissions and we listen. In the Delete Own example, the folder’s PR_ACCESS property has a value representing this level of rights while each item in the folder has different PR_ACCESS property values depending on if a user may or may not delete the particular item.

Permissions Sync Optimizations
The Delete Own example provides a particular challenge to synchronizing permissions with Entourage. If the folder’s Owner changes permissions on the folder such that an Entourage user now has Delete All rights, Entourage must resynchronize the PR_ACCESS value for each and every item within the folder. The Exchange server notifies Entourage that a permission change occurred and the only way for the application to know the full extent of the change is to verify the permissions for all affected items.

While this sounds like a fair amount of overhead for synchronizing permissions, there are three factors working to minimize the resources needed: PR_ACCESS is a small (two bytes) value, a permission change affecting a user is typically are a one-time or rare event, and Entourage optimizes by always assuming Owner level rights (and thus not synching permissions) for a user’s mailbox folders.

So Why Do I Need to Patch My Exchange Server?
The user mailbox optimization is critical to understanding why your organization may want to patch the Exchange servers. The inverse of the optimization is that permission values are synchronized for all folders outside a user’s mailbox (e.g. public folders, a folder/address book/calendar shared with another user, and any delegated folder or mailbox).

Without patching your Exchange server, all folders outside a user's mailbox synchronized by Entourage 2004 SP2 will be read-only. The PR_ACCESS value retrieved by Entourage via WebDAV is returned incorrectly when connected to a non-patched Exchange servers. The property is always returned as read-only, even if the user has a higher level of privileges. Without the patch, Entourage will use these read-only values to lock the user out of performing actions they may actually have permission to perform.  With the patch, the correct value is returned to Entoruage and permissions are accurately reflected within the user interface.

If you are applying the patches, you should consider applying the patch on all servers within your organization (frontend, backend, public folder, etc.). The Entourage team worked side-by-side with the Exchange team on the fix, though the fix will correct permissions for all DAV clients.  To read more about and download the patches, refer to the following KB articles:

• Exchange 2003, KB 888619 (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;888619 )
• Exchange 2000, KB 892986 (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;892986 )

The Exchange 2003 fix will be included in the upcoming Exchange 2003 SP2 release.

Possible Oddities in Synchronizing Permissions
Keeping permissions in sync with an offline client is difficult and there instances where the cached client permissions may differ from the servers:

Downgraded permissions - Entourage’s local cache has Read-Only permissions for a folder while the user actually has a higher level of permissions. The next time the folder synchronizes with the Exchange server, Entourage will update the permissions within the local cache. There’s no risk of losing data, as Entourage will be overzealous in restricting actions until the next sync.

Faux-Escalated permissions - Entourage’s local cache includes a higher level of permissions than those on an Exchange server. For example, an Entourage user has Read-Write privileges on a public folder, goes offline to board an airplane, and, while jetting, posts several new items to the public folder (write activity). During the flight, an administrator removes the write-level permissions for the user on the public folder.

At this point, the offline cache’s permission level is now out of sync with the Exchange server. When the user reconnects, Entourage may or may not update the local permissions before attempting to sync the newly created posts (it’s a timing issue optimized for the most common scenarios). However, the permissions on the Exchange server always trump the permissions cached within Entourage. When Entourage attempts to sync and fails, the newly created items will be moved to the user’s Drafts folder and permission denied errors logged in the Entourage Error Log--the same behavior of Entourage 2004 prior to SP2.

I don't seem to be able to browse the Global Address List (GAL).  I can search, but I cannot browse.
In order to browse the contents of the GAL (or GCL), you must be connecting to a Windows 2003 domain controller's LDAP service.  Entourage utilizes an enhancement to Windows Server's LDAP support known as Virtual List Views.  If Entourage connects to a Windows 2000 domain controller, you will be able to search the contents of your GAL, but not browse.

Every time I try to access the GAL with LDAP, I receive error #-17747.
SP2 includes a fair amount of enhancements to Entourage's general LDAP capabilities.  As a result, some of your previous LDAP settings may need to be updated.  The most common solution for error -17747 is to remove the search base from your directory configuration.  Go to Tools menu : Accounts : Your Exchange Account : Advanced  and empty the Search Base field.

Remember the Office Resource Kit
If you're an IT Administrator and interested in finding out more about how best to deploy Entourage SP2 within your org, check out the updated Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Resource Kit.

- Andy (andyleeruff@hotmail.com)

Service Pack 2 is primarily focused on delivering improved support for using Entourage as an Exchange client.  Beyond Exchange, we did fix a fair number of bugs as well as  (you can read about some more commonly known bugs that we addressed in the Read Me).  For now, I'm going to focus primarily on what we did to improve the Exchange experience:

Improved sync speeds
What used to take hours, now takes minutes.  Prior to SP2, synchronizing an Exchange mailbox took incredibly long and the prioritization of folders always seemed a bit awkward.  We did a lot of work to change the way the app synchronizes folders and gave a higher priority to folders often seen as critical (e.g. the Inbox).  In addition to a lot of general network performance enhancements, we finally hooked-up the Send and Receive All button to Exchange, allowing you to quickly force a sync with the currently viewed folder, calendar, or address book and your Inbox.

Multiple Calendars and Address Books
In Entourage 2004, your Exchange calendar was your calendar, your Exchange address book was your address book.  There was no way to organize an offline, personal calendar or have multiple calendars on the Exchange server.  Furthermore, if you used Entourage to access another user's Exchange calendar, we synched them into your calendar and tagged them with a special category.

No more!  Your Exchange and personal calendars and address books now live separately.  You may now have more than one Exchange calendar and address book.  When you access other's calendars and address books, they live separately.  When you open a public folder that is a calendar (also new in SP2), it appears separately.  No more merged data.  You now have complete control over where your data sits with far less confusing views of the data.

Global Address List Enhancements
You can now view organizational data (direct reports, managers), group membership, and a bevy of other Active Directory attributes.  If you're organization is using Windows 2003 Server, you can even browse the entire contents of your corporate directory.

Improved Public Folders
Sadly, we heard from customers that using Public Folders in Entourage 2004 took as long as nine to ten hours for the entire public folder hierarchy to download!  It was a miserable experience.  SP2 fixes this, as you can now traverse the public folder hierarchy quickly, view the contents of a folder, subscribe to a folder for offline syncs, and even post messages directly within a folder.  As Entourage now supports multiple calendars and address books, you may now view and contribute to calendar and address book public folders.

Sharing Folders, Calendars, and Address Books
You can now assign permissions on Exchange folders, calendars, and address books so that others may access such folders.  This works great for collaboration needs such as sharing calendars among coworkers.  Just select Sharing from a folder's contextual menu.  The interface is very similar to Outlooks, so you may be able to find documentation within your organization describing how to share a folder using Windows Outlook--it should work for Entourage as well!

If someone shares their calendar with you, you may quickly access it via File : Open Other User's Folder... and typing in the coworkers name.  As mentioned before, the calendar is no longer merged with your own. In addition to assigning permissions and quick access to others' folders, we made a couple related enhancements:

Enforcing permissions - Before now, you might put a message into a delegated folder and a few minutes later it'd disappear and a Permission Denied error would display in the Entourage Error Log.  SP2 is proactive about permissions, we now enforce permissions in Entourage's user interface--actions that you aren't able to perform our disabled or prevented.  You receive a notification if you try to perform something you are not allowed to do.

Private Items - When sharing your address books or calendars, you might want to note certain contacts or events to be visible to others.  You may now mark these items as Private within Entourage to prevent others from seeing their contents.  In addition, if you are synchronizing someone else's calendar with Entourage and an event is private, it will display in the calendar but you will be unable to read the event's details (before SP2, you never even saw the event, making it really hard to schedule a get together if some hidden event occurred at your proposed time).

Full Delegation
In Entourage 2004, you could configure yourself as a delegate of others.  With SP2, you can be the boss! You may now assign permissions on your account for delegates to access as well as grant send-on-behalf rights and automatically forward meeting invites to a delegate.

Conversation Grouping
Outlook has a very handy feature that lets you track your e-mail based on conversations with replies to messages in a thread displaying right next to the messages they replied to.  Entourage now supports both generating the appropriate headers so that Entourage users can continue the threads for Outlook users, but it will also sort messages based on these values.

Password Expiration
Entourage 2004 with an expired password was a nightmare. You'd launch Entourage and it would just sit there, not receiving any new e-mail and have no clue why.  With SP2, you'll now get notified of upcoming password expirations so that you might be able to take action before you find yourself in this odd, e-mail-less state.

Mailbox Quotas
You may now quickly determine how much space your Exchange account occupies on the server. Prior to SP2, you'd receive a notification that your Exchange mailbox was full but have no way of determining the best manner for opening up space by deleting or moving messages.  Now, all you have to do is select a folder, open the Folder Properties dialog, and click the Storage tab.

There's one very cool, simple Entourage-only feature related to mailbox quotas that isn't available in Outlook.  In Outlook, when you retrieve a list of all the folders in your Exchange mailbox, you have to hunt through the list to determine which folders occupy the most space on the server.  With Entourage, you can actually sort the folders based on how much space they occupy on the server.  Thus, it becomes incredibly easy to find out which folder is causing you to overstep your mailbox quota and address the problem.  It's a very subtle difference, but we hope that Entourage users will find it useful!

Stay Tuned...
The above list is merely a briefing of what's new with Entourage SP2's enhanced Exchange capabilities (I skipped over a ton of details).  In future posts, I'll be digging deep into the geeky details of our Exchange's Exchange capabilities, highlighting our SP2 changes, and doing my best to provide you with information that might aid in deploying Entourage within your organization. If you have a particular topic you're interested in, please post in comments.

- Andy (andyleeruff@hotmail.com)

Preparing to launch a new version of the Entourage weblog.

Mentioned in gilg's blog:

This white paper describes the different Office for Mac options for working with Exchange Server. The paper also describes the new features of Entourage 2004 for Mac, and provides configuration and troubleshooting information for administrators tasked with supporting Entourage 2004 for Mac.

It is a pdf, get it here: Working with Exchange

http://www.apple.com/pro/music/steriogram/

Enlisting Street Teams
Energetic and shrewd as the young bandmates are, they invite — and sustain — genuinely friendly relationships with their fans. “Since the day we started our website, we have personally replied to almost every email we’ve received,” says Carter. “And we’ve been getting 60 to 100 a day, so that gets kind of crazy when we’re touring and playing shows.”

How do they do it? “Everyone in the band has a PowerBook with Entourage,” says Carter. “So as soon as we get to a town we go to Starbucks or somewhere with high-speed Internet hot spots. We log on and split up the mail between the five of us, and we reply to everything. We get people who say, ‘I never thought I’d hear from you guys again!’ They’re amazed that we take the time. But we know that the personal touch makes them more of a fan, and they want to work even harder for us.”

The Geek Band
“A lot of bands don’t even have a computer,” says Carter. “We are the geek band. Wherever we turn up, we’re working hard on our Macs. We use them seriously all the time — to keep in touch through email, to edit the video we shoot on DV cams, to keep up our website. We even made a video about how much we love our Macs!”

Carter ticks off the Apple tools that are as essential to the band as its drums and guitars: “We’ve got five 15-inch PowerBook G4s, with Cinema Displays and AirPort and Bluetooth. We use Entourage and iLife and we edit video with Final Cut Pro. And we all have iPods — we use them as much as our Macs.”

Neat! (Thanks to MattCe for finding this)

http://www.entourage.mvps.org/

One of the greatest things about Microsoft Entourage, is the community that supports it. Among our great community are a couple of key standouts: our MVP's.

http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/

What are MVP's?

The Microsoft MVP Program is a worldwide award and recognition program that strives to identify amazing individuals in technical communities around the globe who share a passion for technology and the spirit of community. Microsoft MVPs are recognized for both their demonstrated practical expertise and willingness to share their experience with peers in Microsoft technical communities.

Microsoft MVPs are a diverse group of individuals who are:

• Recognized:They are acknowledged by peers and also by Microsoft for their active participation in Microsoft technical communities around the globe.
• Credible:They have demonstrated practical expertise providing the highest quality information and content.
• Accessible:They are active technical community leaders sharing their experience with peers.

And, indeed, our MVPs are truly invaluable. Their volunteer efforts help make using Entourage, and even Entourage itself, a great experience. Kudos to them. The link at the top of this post goes the FAQ website that they have set up. To be honest, there are times when even I have to go to this page to find an answer! That's just how thorough it is!

Thanks again to our Entourage MVP's! I'll be seeing you next month. -Dennis

The Washington Times' Mark Kellner loved Mac Office 2004!  He especially enjoyed Entourage, highlighting the Project Center, three column view, junk mail filtering, and archiving:

Another new feature is archiving, which lets you save all your PIM dates in one file. It will be interesting to see if this file can then be imported into Outlook, but for Mac-only users, being able to create and save a periodic Entourage backup can come in handy.

While Entourage 2004 will not support direct importing of archives into Outlook it wouldn't be very difficult to write a simple .NET app to import the data.  More on that later...

Lead Program Manager on Virtual PC for Mac, Omar Shahine details how innovation occurs within Microsoft's Macintosh group:

Contrary to what people may think, we don’t share features with any other teams. We aren’t obligated to implement anything, and we aren’t tied up much by external dependencies (and this is important). Not having dependencies, like Office has on Windows and vice versa really frees us up. Our only dependencies are internal, and since we control the schedule, it’s much easier to resolve any issues. Having said all this I don’t think it’s fair to say that our applications are so much ahead of our Windows counterparts (well maybe the Project Center is). The thing is, we focus on a very specific set of features (because we are a small team) and we try to get it right the first time. We don’t have the tens of millions of customers to cater to that some of the Windows teams do. Additionally, we appreciate and borrow many features from Windows Office (where we see fit). Good examples of this are the three column view in Outlook 2003 that we added to Entourage. In fact, I'm humbled by all the functionality found in Windows or Office. It's simply amazing what capabilities lie within those two sets of products. Again, all there because to some set of customers they are critical.

Check out Omar's blog.