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Yesterday I stopped using Entourage. Done. For good.

I switched to a Mac over a year ago. There was a lot of things to get used to. Some of them good, some of them bad. Email was one of the bad.

I’ve been an Outlook user for years and for the most part, it was a great product. It did most things I needed pretty well. The problem has always been syncing. Getting my calendar to sync with my wife’s calendar is MONUMENTAL. Almost two years ago, Google created a program that would sync my outlook calendar with my google calendar. It was an answer to prayer and all was happy in the Conley household. Then I switched to a Mac.

Entourage is just stupid. It’s a watered down version of Outlook that doesn’t have all the functionality. There are plenty of things that I hate about Entourage, but the one that hurt the most is that it won’t sync with my Google calendar. There are several other 3rd party apps that do (or claim to do this). Most of them involve you syncing your Entourage with your iCal account and then syncing your iCal with Google Calendar. I’ve been unsuccessful at doing this. The last time I attempted this, it broke Entourage completely.

So, I finally said “no more.” I emailed the IT department and asked them to forward my email to my Gmail account. I love Gmail. Now I can have the same experience with my work mail that I do with my personal mail. Best of all, my personal calendar and work calendar are now one. Now my wife can see what I’m up to at any time or add things to my calendar. No more calendar meetings. The only downside is that most of my co-workers are on Outlook/Entourage, so I can’t really see their availability unless I open up Entourage.

Gateway is talking about moving to Google Apps. I hope we do. If that happens, then calendar sharing and seeing co-worker availability will be so easy! So, if you hate your email, you might want to consider switching to Gmail too.