ExpertsOn™ Software Review

Entourage 2002, like the rest of Office 2002, has a beautiful interface with OSX. It’s quick, fairly intuitive and will handle most of your mailing needs. It can handle multiple POP accounts, allows for you to insert graphics, music and video into the body of your e-mails, allows cut and paste retaining formatted text across all the applications (with some difficulty), which keeps charts, tables and bulleted text intact. Keep in mind, however, that it is a beta product in several ways. It was ported to OSX in a hurry and a few buttons, bells and bows were left behind. Most will no doubt appear in a future version. Maybe.

What has vastly improved in the OSX version is the calendar function. Here’s where this application can become one of the central points of your working day. Entourage has come a long way to becoming a fully functional personal information manager. Why Microsoft doesn’t bite the bullet and do the job right is beyond me, but the current app is a huge step forward.

The calendar was introduced in Entourage 2001 but was clunky, to say the least. It couldn’t compete with real PIMs like Now-Up-To Date’s Calendar and Contact duo or Personal Organizer. E2002 comes a lot closer. The calendar now offers multiple views (day, week, workweek, month). Since calendar items, tasks and notes are all linkable, it’s easy to keep track of complex actions. You can tie multiple contacts, events, and tasks very simply. You can link any of them to external documents as well so it’s easy to find that ad you worked on in Quark yesterday when you want to send it to several people working on a project.
The whole Virtual Card (.vc) idea isn’t well documented and there aren’t two users in a hundred that know what to do with them. The cards are a text version of a contact card, with all the information included. When you get one, double click it and it should add itself to your contact file. Sending one is another story.

Leave it to Microsoft to build in a nifty feature and leave off a practical method of implementing it. The virtual business card idea has been around for a long time and it has been available to Outlook Express and Netscape has had an easy to attach Virtual Card even before that. In Entourage 2002, however, they dropped the ball. There's no way to have your card automatically attached to outgoing mail. There is an add on Apple script you can get from http://www.applescriptcentral.com/ but that’s a kludge.

You can forward other cards as well. The simplest way is to drag it off the address list onto the desktop and then drag it onto the attachments window in outgoing mail. It’s a way to distribute contact lists for workgroups that don’t require retyping.

The workaround adds vcfs to all outgoing mail. What if you don’t want to clog up the system with business cards to your friends and people who already have it? There should be button on the menu to add a card when you feel like. Automatic, OK, but how about a little control here.
One very cool innovation is the ability to note time changes in your tasks and calendar entries. If you live in San Francisco and are dealing with an event in London, you can have it reflect London time.

It would be nice to be able to write notes in the day calendar view without having to jump out to a card or separate note document. It would be nice if the contact file would dial a phone line and log the call. If E2002 did these things, it would be a fully featured PIM and the best on the market since it handles and cross links your e-mail as well, something the others don’t do nearly as well.

Note to Apple: the internal modem needs an external port through to the telephone for automatic dialing and call logging. I really miss that option.

Contextual menus are proliferating but seem to lack robustness. When you want to move a piece of mail into a folder via contextual menu, you can’t see the subfolders. Anyone with a complex mail filing system will find this frustrating. No problem if you leave everything in the in box.

The ability to apply multiple categories to any card, event or task is great and it’s easy to make new categories on the fly. It would be nice to have keyword capacity also to avoid having to make too many categories. Eventually, it will get out of hand. Keyword capability allows you to differentiate within a category and is easy to index and search. Just a passing thought.

When it comes to indexing and searching, E2002 can search 3,000 e-mails with ease on the G4 867.

E2002 brings MSWord’s full dictionary and spelling capabilities to e-mail which will be a godsend to the hordes of spelling deficient out there. It will flag misspellings and the contextual menu offers the right choice 99 percent of the time. A powerful tool for people who want their mail to look good.

E2002 isn’t connected to the Services option of OSX. I can only assume it might at some time in the future.

August 2002

Larry MacDonald, Senior Editor

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