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.
Hey, I’m assuming you use Exchange for email and calendars and stuff. If Gateway uses Exchange 2007, it integrates entirely with Snow Leopard. Your calendars/email/to-dos etc will sync natively. Pretty cool!
Yeah, i was just talking to Jonathan Cliff about that. I’m not positive if we have Exchange 2007 or not. I do have Snow Leopard and I guess this would allow me to sync iCal with exchange and sync iCal with gmail, right? If only everyone could just get along. 🙂
Still an outlook user, but GMail pus to the iPhone finally put me over the edge. I now use GMail for all of my accounts, church, personal, and school…and it’s all (somewhat) seemless. Everything is piled into GMail and then I can send from any of the accounts.
See http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22370 for more on the custom send.
.-= Jesse Smith´s last blog ..Organizing =-.
Yeah, right now I have a yahoo account, a personal gmail account, my church email and email for this blog. Four different accounts. Now that I have my church email coming to gmail, I only have 3 to mannage and I have it set up like Jesse said, so I can reply from any account. Later I may move my blog email into this account too, so I’ll just have one yahoo account and one gmail account. I like it.